Delafield opened the closed door.

The father and son lay together, side by side, the boy’s face in a very winning repose, which at first sight concealed the traces of his long suffering; the father’s also—­closed eyes and sternly shut mouth—­suggesting, not the despair which had driven him to his death, but, rather, as in sombre triumph, the all-forgetting, all-effacing sleep which he had won from death.

They stood a moment, till Delafield fell on his knees.  Julie knelt beside him.  She prayed for a while; then she wearied, being, indeed, worn out with her journey.  But Delafield was motionless, and it seemed to Julie that he hardly breathed.

She rose to her feet, and found her eyes for the first time flooded with tears.  Never for many weeks had she felt so lonely, or so utterly unhappy.  She would have given anything to forget herself in comforting Jacob.  But he seemed to have no need of her, no thought of her.

As she vaguely looked round her, she saw that beside the dead man was a table holding some violets—­the only flowers in the room—­some photographs, and a few well—­worn books.  Softly she took up one.  It was a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, much noted and underlined.  It would have seemed to her sacrilege to look too close; but she presently perceived a letter between its pages, and in the morning light, which now came strongly into the room through a window looking on the garden, she saw plainly that it was written on thin, foreign paper, that it was closed, and addressed to her husband.

“Jacob!”

She touched him softly on the shoulder, alarmed by his long immobility.

He looked up, and it appeared to Julie as though he were shaking off with difficulty some abnormal and trancelike state.  But he rose, looking at her strangely.

“Jacob, this is yours.”

He took the book abruptly, almost as if she had no right to be holding it.  Then, as he saw the letter, the color rushed into his face.  He took it, and after a moment’s hesitation walked to the window and opened it.

She saw him waver, and ran to his support.  But he put out a hand which checked her.

“It was the last thing he wrote,” he said; and then, uncertainly, and without reading any but the first words of the letter, he put it into his pocket.

Julie drew back, humiliated.  His gesture said that to a secret so intimate and sacred he did not propose to admit his wife.

They went back silently to the room from which they had come.  Sentence after sentence came to Julie’s lips, but it seemed useless to say them, and once more, but in a totally new way, she was “afraid” of the man beside her.

* * * * *

She left him shortly after, by his own wish.

“I will lie down, and you must rest,” he said, with decision.