Waterbury evening Democrat., 1889-02-18
CHAPTER TX.


 The morning of Marie's funeral was sunny but bitterly cold; it was one of those days when autumn finally passes into winter and the last memory of the summer warmth van- ishes from the air It had been the saddest dreariest laying to rest. The widowed sister, of whom Marie had spoken in her last hours, had been unable to come, and the two men had gone through it all alone, helped only by the fearful impulsive sympathy and the prac- tical energy of the maid who had been with Marie ever since her marriage, and was as yet hardly capable of realizing her mistress death. .. It was she who, while they were away, had done her best to throw little air of comfort over the forsaken salon. Sue had kindled the fire, watered the plants and thrown open the windows to the sunshine, finding in her toll and movement some little relief from her own heartache and oppression. When Paul came back, and with numb, trembling fingers had stripped himself of his scarf and his great coat, he stepped over the threshold into thA salon and it seemed to him as though the sum- light and the open windows and the cracking blaze of the fire dealt him a sudden blow He walked up to the windows, and shudder- ing, drew them down and closed the blinds, Felicie watching him anxiously from the landing through the half open door. Then
 
 Kendall. coming softly up stairs after him, had gently closed the door from the outside, said kind word to Felicie, and himself slipped noiselessly down again and out into the Champs Elysees. There he had paced up and down for an hour or more under the trees, from which few frosty leaves were still hanging in the December air.
 He himself had been so stunned and be- wildered by the loss which had fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors again, he was for while scarcely able to think consecutively about it. He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but sort of dumb physical con. geniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the sky, in the cheerful distinct ness and sharpness of every outline. And then, little by little, the cheated grief reas- serted itself, the numbed senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men hold those good things whereon, so long as they are still their own, they are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy. A week before, his sisters affection had been to him the one suffi- cient screen between his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought and of existence. The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be rush.
 
 lived, work to be got through, duties to be faced How is it done2 he kept vaguely won dering How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and pos session after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant still cherish in themselves that inexharstible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible mo- tive power of the races
 Presently-by virtue Of long critical and philosophical habit-his mind brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator. Tho interpretive temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally turned outward towards other people, towards books, to- ward intellectual interests But self study had had its charm for him of late, and among other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker-a bystander Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever living curiosity. But bis interest in his particular role had been
 
 individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.
 Then love came by, and the half dormant personality within him had been seized upon and reused, little by little, into a glowing, although repressed and hidden energy He had learned in his own person what it means to crave, to thirst, to want. And now, grief had followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interest of the life that went before theml He looked back over his inter- course with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the mo- ment he could hardly realize them. The ar tistic and @sthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six months be- fore had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighborhood of sorrow and passion His first relation to her had been that of one who knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as @ man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief, balm for his wound-the answer of human tenderness to human need.
 How strange and sad that she should be still in ignorance of his loss and hersI In the early morning after Marie's death, when he woke up from a few heavy hours of sleep, his mind had been full of her. How was the news to be broken to her7 He himself did not feel that he could leave his brother-in- law. There was a strong regard and sym pathy between them; and his presence in the house of mourning would undoubtedly be useful to Paul for while; besides, there were Maries words, Twill you stay with him few days-afterp' which were binding on him. He must write, then; but it was only to be hoped that no newspaper would bring her the news before his letter could reach. 4
 However, as the day wore on, Paul came noiselessly out of the quiet room where the white shrouded form seemed still to spread a tender presence round it, and said to Eustace, with dry, piteous lips:
 ssI have remembered Miss Bretherton: you must go to her tomorrow, after = the funeral" @
 ''I can't bear the thought of leaving you.n said Kendall, laying brotherly hand on his shoulder.
 "Let me write today"
 Paul shook his head. 'She has been i'll. Any way, it will be great shock, but if you go it will be better"