the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her mouth was full;. . .
she was choking. . . . Help!

"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with
official composure.

The clock struck three. They remembered it afterward. Someone
opened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air
which walks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led
the husband into another room. He walked vaguely, like a blind
man, on his creaking boots.



II.


She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway
was in front of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet
penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars,
expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the
cavernous darkness from which she had of late emerged.

She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her
eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light
about her, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at
first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous
creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape--the
vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and
presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a