"Oh!" There was a certain foolishness in his tone. "I hadn't heard." The silence was now busy and thick with thoughts.
She went upstairs to make herself fit to look upon her dead, and, taking her lighted candle, she entered the room where he was lying. She had no fear of him. She went and turned back the sheet as though she only went to rouse him in the morning, and the familiarity of his striped flannel garment was like a mockery of death. How could he be dead when his thin hands protruded from the wristbands she had mended? But he was dead, for he neither opened his eyes nor smiled at her. She looked down, waiting.
"I'm here," she said aloud, but very low--"I'm here, Father."
The lips which had smiled in dying had fallen stern, and the cheeks she kissed were of a bitter cold. She sank to her knees and laid her hands on his.
"Well, we loved each other, didn't we?" she said, and her swollen tears fell into the lips parted to speak to him. "We loved each other, didn't we?"
She knelt there, crying because he would not look at her, and, for the first time, had no kind word. It seemed impossible that she should go on living in a world without his voice, but she knew he had meant to silence it so that he might give her something else. And she was not, in truth, unhappy. She knew she was in the presence of a love infinitely greater than any death, enduring when even the signs of death had crumbled into dust and been gathered in to feed the eager body of earth, and by that love she was ennobled beyond grief.
She dried her tears, smoothed back the grey wisp of hair her breathing had disturbed, and went to the chair where Alexander had neatly laid her father's clothes. She thought there might be a letter for her there, but she found only the book of Shakespeare's sonnets which she had given him, and inside it the latest picture of herself and one of Nancy's youth.
She knelt by the widely opened window, and sensed the night. She thought his spirit must be out there among the hills he loved; that he saw her by the window, and could hear what she was telling him; knew what she was thinking, and felt the swamping pain of her regrets. She stretched her hands over the window-sill, forgetful of the figure on the bed, appealing only to the departed spirit companioning the stars.