They both stopped. Lindau's grand, patriarchal head, foreshortened to
their view, lay white upon the pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed
upon the sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths. Beside his bed
Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veil was thrown back, and her face was
lifted; she held clasped between her hands the hand of the dying man; she
moved her lips inaudibly.




X.

In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when
death comes to any one we know we helplessly regard it as an incident of
life, which will presently go on as before. Perhaps this is an
instinctive perception of the truth that it does go on somewhere; but we
have a sense of death as absolutely the end even for earth only if it
relates to some one remote or indifferent to us. March tried to project
Lindau to the necessary distance from himself in order to realize the
fact in his case, but he could not, though the man with whom his youth
had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually reentered the
region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree. The
changed conditions forbade that. He had a soreness of heart concerning
him; but he could not make sure whether this soreness was grief for his
death, or remorse for his own uncandor with him about Dryfoos, or a
foreboding of that accounting with his conscience which he knew his wife
would now exact of him down to the last minutest particular of their
joint and several behavior toward Lindau ever since they had met him in
New York.