Her face was thin, her temples a little sunk under the smooth bands of black hair, her lips remained resolutely compressed, while her dark eyes grew larger, till at last, with a low cry, she stood up, and instantly stooped to pick up another envelope which had slipped off her knees on to the floor.

She tore it open, snatched out the inclosure. . . .

“My dearest child,” it said, “I am writing this while I am able yet to write legibly.  I am trying hard to save for you all the money that is left; I have only kept it to serve you better.  It is yours.  It shall not be lost:  it shall not be touched.  There’s five hundred pounds.  Of what I have earned I have kept nothing back till now.  For the future, if I live, I must keep back some—­a little—­to bring me to you.  I must come to you.  I must see you once more.

“It is hard to believe that you will ever look on these lines.  God seems to have forgotten me.  I want to see you—­and yet death would be a greater favor.  If you ever read these words, I charge you to begin by thanking a God merciful at last, for I shall be dead then, and it will be well.  My dear, I am at the end of my tether.”

The next paragraph began with the words:  “My sight is going . . .”

She read no more that day.  The hand holding up the paper to her eyes fell slowly, and her slender figure in a plain black dress walked rigidly to the window.  Her eyes were dry:  no cry of sorrow or whisper of thanks went up to heaven from her lips.  Life had been too hard, for all the efforts of his love.  It had silenced her emotions.  But for the first time in all these years its sting had departed, the carking care of poverty, the meanness of a hard struggle for bread.  Even the image of her husband and of her children seemed to glide away from her into the gray twilight; it was her father’s face alone that she saw, as though he had come to see her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him last, but with something more august and tender in his aspect.

She slipped his folded letter between the two buttons of her plain black bodice, and leaning her forehead against a window-pane remained there till dusk, perfectly motionless, giving him all the time she could spare.  Gone!  Was it possible?  My God, was it possible!  The blow had come softened by the spaces of the earth, by the years of absence.  There had been whole days when she had not thought of him at all—­had no time.  But she had loved him, she felt she had loved him, after all.