I.
For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet
lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the
heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk
in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing
of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and
then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her,
like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless
stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without
a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the
vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but
now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesque
visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting
lines of verse, obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld,
indistinct impressions of rivers, towers, and cupolas, gathered in the
length of journeys half forgotten--through her mind there now only moved
a few primal sensations of colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction
in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of
medicine... and that she should never again hear the creaking of her
husband's boots--those horrible boots--and that no one would come to
bother her about the next day's dinner... or the butcher's book....

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening
obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with pale geometric
roses, circling softly, interminably before her, now darkened to a
uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars. And
into this darkness she felt herself sinking, sinking, with the gentle
sense of security of one upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tide it
rose around her, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in its velvety
embrace her relaxed and tired body, now submerging her breast and
shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her
throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth.... Ah, now it was rising
too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed;... her mouth was full;...
she was choking.... Help!

"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with official
composure.

The clock struck three. They remembered it afterward. Someone opened the
window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air which walks
the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led the husband into
another room. He walked vaguely, like a blind man, on his creaking
boots.

II.

She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was in
front of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as the
gathered glimmer of innumerable stars, expanded gradually before her
eyes, in blissful contrast to the cavernous darkness from which she had
of late emerged.

She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes
began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her,
she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming in
the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous creations, then gradually
resolved into distincter shape--the vast unrolling of a sunlit