“Who—­what—­do you suppose it was?”

“I don’t know.”  Then, suddenly,—­“Tell me.  Tell me! Was it she?”

“Send them away!” he said to her after a time.  She turned, and those who stood about seemed to catch the wish upon her face.  They fell back for a space, silent, or talking in low tones.

“Come,” he said.

He led her a pace or so, about the scanty wall of shrubbery.  He pulled back a bit of old and faded silk, a woman’s garment of years ago, from the face of that something which lay there, on a tiny cot, scarce larger than a child’s bed.

It was the face of a woman grown, yet of a strangely vague and childlike look.  The figure, never very large, was thin and shrunken unbelievably.  The features, waxy-white, were mercifully spared by the flames which had licked at the shielding hands and arms that had borne her hither.  Yet they seemed even more thin, more wax-like, more unreal, than had their pallor come by merciful death.  Death?  Ah, here was written death through years.  Life, full, red-blooded, abounding, luxuriant, riotous, never had animated this pallid form, or else had long years since abandoned it.  This was but the husk of a human being, clinging beyond its appointed time to this world, so cruel and so kind.

They stood and gazed, solemnly, for a time.  The hands of Josephine St. Auban were raised in the sign of her religion.  Her lips moved in some swift prayer.  She could hear the short, hard breathing of the man who stood near her, grimed, blistered, disfigured, in his effort to bring away into the light for a time at least this specter, so long set apart from all the usual ways of life.

“She has been there for years,” he said, at last, thickly.  “We kept her, I kept her, here for her sake.  In this country it would be a sort of disgrace for any—­any—­feeble—­person, you know, to go to an institution.  Those are our graves over yonder in the yard.  You see them?  Well, here was our asylum.  We kept our secrets.

“She was this way for more than ten years.  She was hurt in an accident—­her spine.  She withered away.  Her mind was gone—­she was like a child.  She had toys, like a child.  She wept, she cried out like a child.  Very often I was obliged to play—­Ah! my God!  My God!”

“This was one of your family.  It was that which we heard—­which we felt—­about the place—?” Her voice was very clear, though low.

“My wife!  Now you know.”  He dropped back, his face once more between his hands, and again she fell into silence.

“How long—­was this?” at length she asked quietly.