She
looked not merely beautiful, but Beauty's self vouchsafed to mortal eyes.
I do not know how long I gazed. Vaguely, between Kitty's sobs, I heard the
ticking of a watch.
"For another woman of such loveliness," at length said a reverent voice
behind me, "we must wait the final evolution of humanity."
Dr. Upton, one of Reid's friends whom I had seen at the wedding, had
reached the house before me. He had been examining a glass, a spoon and
some other objects so quietly that I had not heard. He said that Helen had
been dead some hours.
Mechanically I listened, but it was not until afterward that I understood
the full purport of his speech or of Kitty's story of the night and
morning. Their words reached me as if spoken from some great distance by
the people who live in dreams.
Kitty had come to us; she stood in the doorway, white and shaking.
"Helen--Helen's head ached," she sobbed, "and she begged me to brush her
hair, but when I began, she said it hurt, and told me to stop; then she
fell to writing. I coaxed her to come to bed, for I thought she was ill;
but she called me 'Kathryn' and then I knew I couldn't manage her.
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