“In mourning, my own dear. No great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried a little muff of astrachan. She has near the left eye,” he continued, “a tiny vertical scar--”
I stopped him short. “The mark of a caress from her husband.” Then I added: “How close you must have been to her!” He made no answer to this, and I thought he blushed, observing which I broke straight off. “Well, goodbye.”
“You won’t stay a little?” He came to me again tenderly, and this time I suffered him. “Her visit had its beauty,” he murmured as he held me, “but yours has a greater one.”
I let him kiss me, but I remembered, as I had remembered the day before, that the last kiss she had given, as I supposed, in this world had been for the lips he touched.
“I’m life, you see,” I answered. “What you saw last night was death.”
He spoke with a kind of soft stubbornness, and I disengaged myself. We stood looking at each other hard.
“You describe the scene--so far as you describe it at all--in terms that are incomprehensible. She was in the room before you knew it?”
“I looked up from my letter-writing--at that table under the lamp, I had been wholly absorbed in it--and she stood before me.”
“I sprang up with an ejaculation, and she, with a smile, laid her finger, ever so warningly, yet with a sort of delicate dignity, to her lips. I knew it meant silence, but the strange thing was that it seemed immediately to explain and to justify her. We, at any rate, stood for a time that, as I’ve told you, I can’t calculate, face to face. It was just as you and I stand now.”
He impatiently protested. “Ah! _we’re_ not staring!”
“Well, _we_ were--after a fashion.” He lost himself in the memory of it. “It was as friendly as this.” I had it on my tongue’s end to ask if that were saying much for it, but I remarked instead that what they had evidently done was to gaze in mutual admiration. Then I inquired whether his recognition of her had been immediate. “Not quite,” he replied, “for, of course, I didn’t expect her; but it came to me long before she went who she was--who she could only be.”
I thought a little. “And how did she at last go?”
“Just as she arrived. The door was open behind her, and she passed out.”