Edward Neal’s face during these weeks was like the face of a man lost in a trackless desert, seeking vainly for some sign of road to save his life.  Sickness and death were as foreign to the young, vital, irrepressible currents of his life, as if he had been a bird or an antelope.  But it was not now with him the mere bewildered grief of a sensuous animal nature, such as I should have anticipated that his grief would be.  He dimly felt the truth, and was constantly terrified by it.  He came into Annie’s presence more and more reverently each day.  He gazed speechlessly into her eyes, which rested on him always with angelic compassion and tenderness, but with no more look of human wifely thought than if he and she were kneeling side by side before God’s white throne.  Sometimes he dared not touch even so much as the hand on which his own wedding-ring rested.  Sometimes he would kneel by the bedside and bury his face and weep like a little child.  Then he would throw himself on his horse and gallop away and not come home until twilight, when he was always found on Annie’s lounge in the library.  One night when I went to him there he said, in a tone so solemn that the voice did not sound like his,—­

“Helen, there is something I do not understand about Annie.  Do people always seem so when they are going to die?  I do not dare to ask her if she loves me.  I feel just as much awe of her as if she had been in heaven.  It seems sometimes as if I must be going mad, for I do not feel in the least as if she had ever been my wife.”

“She never has, poor boy,” I thought, but I only stroked his hair and said nothing; wondering in my heart at the certainty with which in all natures love knows how to define, conquer, reclaim his own.

The day before Annie died she asked for her jewel-case, and spent several hours in looking over its contents and telling me to whom they should be given.  I observed that she seemed to be searching uneasily for something she could not find.

“What is it, dear?” I said.  She hesitated for a secondhand then replied,—­

“Only a little ring I had when I was a girl.”

“When you were a girl, my darling!” I exclaimed.  She smiled gently and said,—­

“I feel like an old woman now.  Oh, here it is,” she added, and held it out to me to open for her the tiny padlock-shaped locket which hung from it.  It had become so tightly fastened together that it was with great difficulty I could open it.  When I did so, I saw lying in the hollow a little ring of black hair, and I remembered that Annie had worn the ring when she was twelve years old.

She asked me to cut a few of the silky hairs from the baby’s head, and then one little curl from her own, and laying them with the other, she shut the locket and asked for a piece of paper and pencil.  She wrote one word with great difficulty, folded the ring in the paper, wrote another word on the outside, and laid it in a corner of the jewel-case.  Then she sank back on the pillows, and slipping her left hand under her cheek said she was very tired, and almost instantly fell into a gentle sleep.  She did not wake until twilight.  I was to sleep on the lounge in her room that night, and when she woke I was preparing it.