She stayed there for a long while--longer even than she knew. The light failed. She rose slowly to her feet. Descent was difficult; she knew now how weak she was. Now and again she stumbled. Over her eyes there was a strange dimness, the gradual decay of thought. Presently limbs and brain alike refused their offices. She felt as though she were being taken up bodily into the grip of some great grey, mocking Shape that held her to itself and paralyzed her. But she pressed on, guided by some unswerving instinct, to the door of the convent. There, and there only, she dropped in the act of pulling at the bell.
Some one came; some one carried her into her room. She revived when water was poured on her forehead and her hands were laved. They left her. After a while she recovered sufficiently to undress. Presently all was still.
There was no sound in the convent now, not even in the chapel; the dull droning of monks in their lonely cells, chanting offices of penitence and remorse, did not reach her. And now in this infinitely lonely hour, alike afar from friend and foe, a kinder form seemed to come close, one which she did not recognize, yet which made clear those hidden things about which she still feared to ask.
Away in the distance, very far away, as she passed swiftly through those grey shadows of oblivion which so many of us would welcome as friends, she saw the figure of her lover up to the last standing erect and triumphant on his little pinnacle of fame, the living symbol of that for which she had come near renouncing every hope of the hereafter which held her at that very moment in its grip. The vision dispersed. Through the room, very slowly, she thought she felt little streams of cold air filtering; they made a dull rhythm, like the running water of a Highland burn. She tried to listen to their music, but could not; in the hour of death the brain, last servant to escape from the house of a powerful master, mocks our call. She struggled desperately to come back from the long passage down which her weakened spirit was being compelled--the last effort of one who was born a fighter. Over her body an icy sweat had broken, in her limbs there was no longer warmth or life. She listened to the beats of her heart striking dimly like the hammer of a clock that was running out. This, then, was death--the truce to struggle.