An Unconventional Mourner

NORA sat in her bedroom, sewing. The shutters had been carefully bowed, and only two thin streaks of sunlight slanted brilliantly across the gloom. Nora had pushed her chair close to one of the windows so that she could see her work. She did not see it very well, but of this fact she was unconscious. Her tear-dimmed eyes were fixed upon the piece of linen in her lap; but what they really saw was another darkened room below, where her half-brother lay dead. She would have liked to sit there by his side, to be as close to him as she could for the little time that was left before they carried him to his grave; but she had not dared to proffer her request. He lay alone, save when the undertaker’s men passed in and out of the chamber. His young widow was — to use his aunt, Mrs. Pennington’s, correct phrase — “prostrated with grief.” His children were shut up in their nursery. Every few minutes the doorbell rang. Cards and notes were handed mournfully in. Reporters called for particulars, and were interviewed by Mrs. Pennington in the hall. A dressmaker and her assistant, a milliner and hers, a children’s outfitter and hers, came, bearing the panoply of woe. There is a great deal to be done in the three days that elapse between a man’s death and his burial; and the exigencies of our advanced civilization have complicated an otherwise simple situation.

Fortunately, Mrs. Pennington was more than able to cope with the melancholy problem. She sat in the library, writing notes on black-edged paper, which — with admirable forethought — she had brought with her that morning to the bereaved household. She knew there would be letters to write, and, as she folded the last sheet into its grief-stricken envelope, she congratulated herself on having remembered so important a detail. One good deed suggesting another, she arose, and went softly into the adjoining room. “Florence, dear,” she murmured, “if you can spare me for a few minutes, I think I had better run upstairs, and speak to Nora about her mourning. She has been so nervous and restless all day, it is impossible to find out what she needs.”

“She needs everything, Aunt Anna,” said Mrs. Lennox, lifting her heavy head from its pillow. “Don’t think about me, please, but go to her right away. And, dear Aunt Anna, will you remember about the children’s black gloves ? Sarah will give you their numbers, or, at least, she will hunt up some old gloves that will do for the sizes. And tell her, please, that Jennings will send lustreless silk for Amy’s sash. Poor little Amy! ” And the mother’s voice broke. Her husband had shown an especial tenderness for his firstborn daughter.

Mrs. Pennington heaved a sympathetic sigh, and stole quietly away. She passed the death chamber with a step as soft and fearful as a cat’s, and mounted the stairs to her niece’s room. Her brow wrinkled a little as she neared it. Nora was so “uncertain.”

“Dear child!” she said, when she saw the upright figure sitting sewing by the window. “ Why do you try to work ? You are straining your eyes, and you look so white and tired. Lie down a little while, and let me bathe your head.”

“My head does n’t ache, thank you, Aunt Anna,” said the girl. “It never aches. Neither do my eyes. I am perfectly well.”

“You can’t be perfectly well, Nora dear,” hinted her aunt reproachfully, “after all you have been through. You are running on your nerves now, and, if you do not spare yourself, they will break.”

Nora was silent. She knew she had no nerves, just as she knew she had no headache. She was, in fact, indecently well. Only her heart was sick with grief, and this was a circumstance she was not invited to mention. All day long her mind had traveled backward and forward over those scenes of her life in which her brother had played a part. They were not very many, nor very soul-inspiring. Tom Lennox had been kind to his orphaned half-sister, had looked after her affairs, had gone to see her now and then when she was at boarding-school, had always given her a Christmas present, and had sometimes remembered her birthday; but his calm, fraternal regard had never quickened into livelier interest until the past winter, when his wife had resignedly undertaken the task of introducing the girl into society. In the labors that ensued he had borne a fluctuating part; and gradually there dawned upon his mind an .impression that Nora was, in a quiet way, “conversable;” not, of course, as popular as Florence (with whom no one ever conversed), but still a girl who could always harbor an idea, and occasionally advance an opinion. She was like him, too (“Lord! but she’s like her father!” was his way of noting the resemblance), and there flowed between them that swift current of inherited sympathies and tendencies of which the backwater is aversion. Above all, the quality of her affection, which he understood; its excess, and the narrow limits of its expression, contrasted pleasantly with his wife’s frank rendering of her daily part. The level permanence of marital regard, its moderation and its durability, alternately soothed and appalled him. He wondered sometimes if he had been married ten or twenty years. In pensive moments he pictured to himself the jog-trot of existence extending indefinitely into the future, marked rather by the changing outlines of his children’s lives than by any variations in his own. What had never occurred to him was the possibility of dying at thirtyseven.

“Nora,” said Mrs. Pennington gently, “ Miss Briggs is coming this evening for her first fittings, and I am having coats sent up from Pierce’s on approval. But I wish you would tell me what else you need, so that I can order it for you.”

“I don’t need anything,” said the girl. “I don’t need a coat. I have one now.”

“ One that you can wear ? ” asked Mrs. Pennington incredulously.

“ It’s serge. Black serge. I have a coat and skirt. They will do very well, Aunt Anna.”

“I wish they were drap d’été,” said Mrs. Pennington musingly. “I always think a drap d ’ete or a Henrietta cloth is most appropriate for deep mourning. But I dare say you can wear serge in rough weather, if it’s properly made; and it’s a comfort to have something to put on. Poor Florence says she has absolutely nothing. Tom never could endure black. Will you let me see your suit, dear ? ”

Nora obediently opened her wardrobe, and took out the garment for inspection. Mrs. Pennington uttered a little grieved cry of protest. “ My dear,” she said, “ you did n’t think of wearing a dress strapped with taffeta to the funeral! And you can’t take the silk off. The spaces will show. But never mind. Pierce will be certain to have something to suit you.”

“Aunt Anna,” said Nora suddenly and harshly, “what difference does it make whether I wear this coat or another to my brother’s funeral ? What difference does it make to Tom ? What difference to me?”

Mrs. Pennington was conscious of a sentiment which in a less amiable woman might have been termed exasperation. There are few things in this world more annoying than to be suddenly called upon to defend the rationality of time-honored customs. The Hindu priest, when asked by some Ra jpoot widow of an inquiring and dissatisfied turn of mind why she should be consumed upon her dead lord’s pyre; the Moslem husband whose most cherished wife expresses an inclination to see the world; the devout Brahman whose disciple wonders whether the preservation of his caste is worth the torment it entails, might, one and all, have sympathized with Mrs. Pennington’s discomposure. She had studied the subject of mourning from its practical rather than from its abstract side, having put it on fourteen times in the course of a wellspent life, and being more than ready to wear it a fifteenth time — in a modified form — for her nephew. In fact, except when some ill-advised relative expired thoughtlessly in the beginning of a season, just after her winter or her summer gowns had been sent home, Mrs. Pennington rather enjoyed the familiar experience. She was a wealthy woman, and it gave her a reasonable pretext for buying a quantity of new clothes. She was a woman of few interests, and it gave her something to think about, and to do. She was an affectionate woman, and it gave her an expensive method of evincing her regard. Nora’s troubled scorn, and the glaring impropriety of her question were doubly shocking to one who had walked so often and so decorously along the crapebordered paths of grief. She would not permit herself to be angry; but she felt that the occasion was one which called for plainness of speech. “It ought to make a difference to you,” she said with grave displeasure. “You would not like people to say you had failed in respect to your brother’s memory.”

“But, Aunt Anna,” protested the girl piteously, “Tom always laughed at such things. I have heard him again and a gain. It is n’t as though I did not know how he felt about them. He used to call a crape veil the luxury of woe; and I told him once I’d never wear one,”

“ Nora! ” said Mrs. Pennington, doubly scandalized by her niece’s sudden defiance, and by this ill-timed allusion to a dead man’s laughter. Tom, to be sure, had laughed at far too many things in life. His mirthful eyes had looked with obstinate levity upon their sad significance. Perhaps, having married Florence, laughter was his salvation. In the struggle for readjustment, he had learned the saving value of a jest. But of this Mrs. Pennington could hardly have been expected to take account; and her lightminded nephew had seemed to her at times perilously near the spirit that denies. Now he was dead, and it behooved them all to forget for a while that he had ever laughed at all. We may with propriety allude to a man’s merriment, and even repeat his jokes, when he has been buried six months or a year; but before the funeral it is customary to confine our comments to his virtues, his constitution, and his real estate.

As for the veil, that was a matter too sacred for dispute. The poor lady felt that never before had she been called upon to meet so grave an issue, to avert so imminent a disaster. She had shrewdlv suspected that Nora would prove troublesome and “notiony;” that she might perhaps prefer broadcloth to Henrietta; and that she would probably forget to provide herself with the right sort of black pins. But that she would want to go unveiled to her brother’s funeral, that she would actually propose to appear in public without the proper insignia of female distress, was much, much worse than anything Mrs. Pennington had feared. Come what might, this scandal should be averted. No niece of hers should sin against the sacred conventions of sorrow. She gathered up all her argumentative forces for the combat.

“Nora,” she said, “if you were not so nervous and excitable this evening, you would not speak as you do. Of course you will wear a veil. You would be very uncomfortable if you did not. Every one would notice it, and think it strange. A veil, dear, is such a protection in time of grief.”

“A protection from what?” asked Nora dully.

“A protection,” Mrs. Pennington repeated, firmly and conclusively. “It shows you are in mourning. And you have no idea how comfortable these light veilings are. If it were the old-fashioned English crape, now, I should not blame you for feeling as you do. It used to drag your bonnet off your head, it was so heavy. If you wore it over your face, it stifled you,and you couldn’t see where you were going; and if you wore it thrown back, it stood out like boards, — so stiff and ungraceful. Never fell into soft lines like the French veiling does. You won’t find you mind it at all, Nora dear; and, after the first few weeks, you can have it arranged in those broad, flat folds that hang straight down your back. I think they give you height. All you will want over your fa ce then will be one of the short net veils with three little rows of crape. They are rather pretty and becoming.”

Nora listened in silence. There trailed dimly through her mind an impression that graceful folds and added height failed to symbolize the cold desolation of her heart. Tom would have laughed, — but Tom lay dead downstairs, never to laugh again. She shivered as she thought of him, and, obeying some sudden impulse, some desire too potent for denial, she raised the window by her side, and pushed back the bowed shutters. A flood of heavenly light, the last brilliant rays of the setting sun, filled the dolorous room, and for one brief instant lifted the girl’s soul to divine heights of consolation. It was for one instant only. The next, Mrs. Pennington stepped swiftly forward, and restored the appropriate gloom. There was something in her haste, and in the real horror she evinced, which covered Nora with confusion. Her own action had been involuntary, — a mere instinctive craving for the innocent sunlight; and it shamed her to see her aunt watching her with apprehensive eyes, as though wondering in what direction she would break out next. Why should she give trouble to any one at such a time ? After all, what difference did it make ? Tom no longer cared, no longer laughed at anything. She would do just as she was bidden, and would wear just what she was told to wear. Only she felt that further discussion of goods and styles would be insupportable. She must escape for a while, and the thought of the children in their nursery came to her as a measure of relief. If they were too young to realize their loss, they were also too young for the conventionalities of regret. She had not heard one of them all day. Perhaps they were wearying of isolation and restraint.

“Aunt Anna,” she said, “don’t look so worried, please. I would rather not wear a veil; but if you and Florence want me to, why, of course, I will. And I’ll put aside this suit, and get whatever you think I need. And now, if there is nothing else to decide, I am going over to the children for a little while. I think I ’ll bring them here to play. They must be so tired of the nursery.”

“Poor little things,” sighed their grandaunt, her anxious expression relaxing into one of mitigated melancholy. “It may comfort you to have them with you. But don’t let them make any noise, Nora. I have tried to keep them quiet all day for their mother’s sake.”

There was no answer. Nora ha d slipped away, and was hurrying to the big, lowceilinged nursery at the back of the house. When she opened the door, she found the chambermaid and the waitress gossiping lugubriously with Sarah, the nurse, and listening with gratifying interest to the intimate details which that functionary was able to impart. They backed respectfully away as Nora entered, glancing at her with an unctuous sympathy which brought the blood burning to her cheeks. They were sorry for her, they were sorry for their mistress, they had kissed Amy until she cried, and had shed a few warm tears over the baby Georgina’s head. They were ready at a moment’s notice to praise their dead master in fluent superlatives, and they prayed piously, though not very hopefully, for his soul. But the peculiar pleasure which the Celtic mind takes in the close proximity of a corpse was theirs to enjoy. The hushed and darkened house, the constant presence of the genteel undertaker and his men, the flowing crape on the doorbell, the decorous melancholy of the people who left cards, and, above all, the near prospect of a funeral, filled them with chastened delight. They wagged their heads mournfully when they left the room; and Sarah, to whom the occasion had brought an access of work as well as of dignity, gave a lachrymose sniff as she put Georgina from her knee. The little girl, who was three years old, looked at her aunt with pleased eyes. “Papa’s dead,” she observed painstakingly.

There was a restless movement at the window, where the oldest child, a boy of eight, stood staring wearily into the yard. It being manifestly impossible to keep the nursery darkened, the blinds were drawn up, and an enlivening vista of back gates was presented to the view. Little Tom, commonly called June, as an abridgement of Thomas Junior, looked frown - ingly and longingly at these gates. They seemed barren of delight, but they had their charm for him. A boy of his own age came into the adjoining yard, and he rapped with his knuckles on the window pane, vainly seeking to establish communication.

“Don’t do that, Master June,” said Sarah warningly.

His frown deepened. He rapped again, more softly, and craned his neck to see his vanishing friend.

“June,” said Nora, “do you and Amy want to come to my room for a while, and have me read to you?”

Amy scrambled to her feet. She had been dusting the furniture in her doll’s house. “I want to play Old Maid,” she said. “Aunt Nora, won’t you play Old Maid with me?”

“You don’t know how to play,” said June scornfully. “She thinks she does, Aunt Nora, but she does n’t.”

“I do,” protested Amy, and began promptly to cry.

Georgina looked intently at her weeping sister. Then her round face lengthened, her mouth squared. She had a sympathetic nature, and it was her fretful hour. She began to cry, too.

“Sure, it’s tired they are,” said the patient Sarah, “being shut up here all the blessed day. Stop cryin’ now, me darlints, and go with your aunt. It’s your own new hats and coats are coming tonight, and a new black suit for Master June; and to-morrow you ’ll be going to spend the day with your little cousins, — and that will be getting thim out of the way, thank the Lord! The poor innocents!” And she tenderly wiped Georgina’s streaming eyes.

But Nora stood staring sorrowfully at the group. She did not understand the nature of children, to whom only the things of childhood count, and she harshly begrudged them their brief period of unconcern. Did June know that he would never touch his father’s hand again ? Amy, who always held to her purpose, was gathering together, even while she sobbed, a pack of battered toy cards. Her brother shoved her, and the cards fell scattering to the ground. Amy cried louder than ever, but picked them up again. The boy looked into Nora’s face with laughing eyes. “We’ll have to let her play,” he said; “but she really does n’t know how.” There was something in his amusement and swift surrender which made Nora’s heart-strings tighten. Both were so like Tom. She laid his little hand upon her cheek. “ Come and play,” she said.

It was five weeks after the funeral. Florence had gone to Lakewood, taking Amy and Georgina with her. One of the requisitions of modern mourning is a trip of this character. Our winter resorts are filled with black-swathed ladies, recuperating their shattered forces after the fatigues which the trained nurses have undergone. Florence, every one said, required a change. Nora, being admittedly robust, had preferred to stay at home, and June had been left with her, so that he could continue to go to school. It was understood on all sides that the boy, who so closely resembled his father, was to be her finest solace. Even Mrs. Pennington accepted this eminently correct conclusion, and Florence had been touchingly sweet about parting with her son for his young aunt’s sake. “I must share my consolations with my sister,” she said; and every one remarked — truly — that it was just the kind of lovely thing they would have expected dear Florence to do.

Nora alone failed to adjust herself to this graceful fallacy. She knew she was supposed to centre her affections upon her nephew, to find in him at once a balm for her sorrow, and an outlet for her untiring devotion. But her heart rejected the panacea. She was unable to live up to the exquisite sentimentalities of the situation, to play with grace the noble part assigned her. How could a little boy of eight take Tom’s place! Tom had been her gilded idol, her sole possession, the one human being whom she had loved all her life, and whose mind had led her mind in pursuit. Because she had no father, nor mother, nor sister; because she had drifted since childhood from one alien hearth to another; because she lacked that blessed gregariousness which might have surrounded her with friends, she had built too much upon this one foundation. What made her grief all the harder to bear was her inability to assume an attitude toward it. There is no such help in life as an attitude, well chosen and well sustained. The Romans knew its value well, and stand clear-cut in history because of their appreciation. Who ever disassociates a noble Roman from his attitude ? What else makes Macaulay’s lays forever dear to youth ?

Mrs. Pennington, for example, conceived that the “ sacred ness of sorrow” — a phrase to which she was partial — compelled her to retire from public view after the death of a near relative. She discouraged visits of condolence as “intrusions” upon this sacredness; she was offended rather than pleased when friends wrote to express their sympathy; and she made it a point of honor never to recognize any one upon the streets. The shutting of herself up with her grief and her new crape was not for her the desolating thing it seemed; for as soon as we can turn our minds from our trouble to our way of bearing our trouble, comfort has entered our hearts. Florence, on the other hand, was brave and cheerful; welcomed the advances of her friends; felt it her duty not to “give way,” nor to imperil her health (which was excellent); and had what was prettily described as a smile of “heart-breaking sweetness” whenever her little children loomed upon her horizon. In short, she behaved so beautifully that she could not help knowing how beautifully she behaved, and she would have been more than human had this fact brought her no consolation.

But poor Nora never thought about behavior at all. Even little June’s presence failed to give her this useful clue. Her mind fixed itself with terrible intensity upon one fact, and one only: Tom was dead. Like a person in acute physical pain, she took no count of other phenomena in life. Sometimes she tortured herself by recalling his tricks of speech and manner, by trying to remember just how he wrinkled the skin on the bridge of his nose when he was amused, and how he mimicked Amy’s self-conscious rendering of her little tepid kindergarten songs. Sometimes she tried to picture to herself the spirit Tom, — Tom divested of his earthly parts, and one with the great army of the blessed. But this was terribly hard. If Tom had ever possessed a spiritual side, he had concealed it from his sister, as from the rest of the world, and she could not now successfully contemplate what she had never known. The clergyman who officiated at the funeral had, it is true, expressed a fond assurance of his late parishioner’s eternal bliss; and had even hazarded a description of the sanctified soul wandering in the paths of Paradise, and looking down with sympathetic interest upon his sorrowing relatives. But then, it was felt by all present that no one had known Mr. Lennox less intimately than his rector. Had Nora been a Roman Catholic, she would have flung herself with fervor into the great business of releasing Tom from Purgatory. She would have followed the habit of a lifetime in praying for the dead, in draining the treasury of grace for a waiting soul, in uniting herself day by day and hour by hour, not with an aloof and illumined saint, — Tom was so remote from sanctity, — but with a dear sinner whom she loved, and whom her love might help. Having been taught not to pray for the dead, her lips were sealed, her heart abstained from invocations. Tom was, of course, happy (what else could she permit herself to think?), but she had no part to play in his wellbeing. And he had been tolerably happy when alive.

The days dragged on. Nora helped June with his lessons, and gave him as much of her companionship as he wanted, — which was very little. He preferred to be with other boys. If he thought about his father, he preserved the helpless taciturnity of childhood, and never spoke his thoughts. When Mrs. Pennington asked him if he missed his dear mother, he said “yes,” like a dutiful little son; but when she pushed the sentiment too far, and added, “And you miss your little sisters, too?” he answered stoutly, “No.” He was, in the main, a truthful child, and would not be cajoled into transparent fiction.

Florence wrote the sweetest kind of letters from Lakewood. Every one was so kind to her, she said. Every one respected her grief, and tried to show their sympathy. Amy had been sick for two days, and the loveliest flowers had been sent her. The room was a bower of roses. “It is beautiful to feel, Nora dear, how much real goodness there is in the world, how deep and true is the spirit of kindliness. I try hard to meet it half way. I know I have no right to selfishly nurse my sorrow.”

To which Nora replied as best she could: “ June won a prize this week for declamation. He recited “ Wynken, Blynken and Nod.” I am making him say it every evening, so that he will remember it when you get back. Maggie ” (the housemaid) “cut her hand rather badly yesterday, and I thought Dr. Warren had better see it, and bind it up. He said it will be all right in a few days. He inquired for you very affectionately. I sent you the stockings for Georgina on Monday.”

This was all. She felt the meagreness of every sheet; but the sad days afforded her no finer inspiration.

A week before Florence was expected home, Nora, returning from a round of errands, came face to face with a visitor slowly descending the steps. She recognized her, after a moment’s uncertainty, as a young married woman whom she had met a few times, and whose vivacity upon these occasions she had somewhat wistfully admired. Being herself too often inarticulate, she had a natural appreciation of the quick, light word, the soft laughter, the infectious gayety which make the luxury of conversation. She held out her hand with diffidence. “Florence is still away,” she said, “at Lakewood. She would have liked to see you, I know. Will you come in and see me, instead?”

Mrs. Hastings seemed poised for flight; but she hesitatingly accepted the lukewarm invitation, and turned back to the house. Nora led the way to the drawingroom, and for a few moments the two young women talked with the painstaking vapidity of people who are pushing resolutely back the one absorbing image in their minds. Mrs. Hastings made perfunctory inquiries about Florence, and Nora explained that her sister-in-law felt much better for her stay at Lakewood, that she had the two little girls with her, that Amy was rather a delicate child, and had been sick for several days. Then she paused, conscious that her visitor was not listening, and that two blue eyes — eyes so blue they burned — were fixed with urgent scrutiny upon her face. There was a moment’s silence. “How dreadfully unhappy you are!” said Barbara Hastings.

Nora quivered. The thrust was so direct. No one had said that in such plain words to her before. No one had looked at her with such blazing eyes. Was it pity she read in them, or exultation, or—despair ? She felt the barriers of her soul giving way, and made a final instinctive effort at self-defence. “How do you know?” she whispered.

The blue eyes blurred. If it were pity she saw now in their depths, it was entreaty, too. “ How do I know ? ” faltered Barbara Hastings. “How do I know?” — and then suddenly she covered her face with her hands, and burst into a storm of tears. Such tears! Never in all her life had Nora witnessed anything like this wild abandonment to pent-up passion and grief. She watched the crouched figure, which had lost all its fastidious delicacy of outline, she listened to the loud and strangled sobs, and there swept through her mind some understanding of the restraint which had been imposed upon this laughing young creature, and which had given way like a rotten dyke. She recalled Mrs. Hastings as she had seen her last, a charming and glittering figure standing at the head of brilliantly lit stairs, and deftly parrying Tom’s light-hearted praise. “Please, Mr. Lennox, say some of those admirable things over again before Jim,” she had urged. “Here he is now, and I want him to know what a lovely wife he’s got. He’s so slow about seeing it unless some one gives him the clue. And remember, if I die, it’s up to you to make him understand what he has lost.” And then they had all swept, laughing and chattering, downstairs, and had said a last goodnight.

A last good-night! How short a time ago this was, and how well Nora remembered every trivial word! Her heart contracted painfully as she sat in silence, waiting until exhaustion should quiet the weeping woman by her side. She did not speak to her, nor touch her. She offered nothing of what is called sympathy. But in her deep and patient silence there was a quality of comradeship which perhaps the other understood. After a long, long while, Mrs. Hastings began to struggle, feebly at first, and then with a stronger effort, for self-control. She uncovered her disfigured face, wiped her eyes, and tried with trembling hands to straighten her hat, and arrange her disordered dress. Then Nora spoke for the first time. “May I lend you a veil?” she asked.

“Yes, if you please, — if you have a thick one,” was the matter-of-fact answer, and Nora went upstairs to fetch it, lingering on the way, so as to allow her visitor a few merciful moments for readjustment.

When she came down again, Mrs. Hastings was standing before a mirror, smoothing away, as best she could, the evidence of her tears. She pinned on the veil, and turned to go. Nora held out her hand. What could they say, these two, after such a revelation ? The shame and the entreaty which burned in one woman’s heart could not be spoken, and neither could an assurance of silence and trust be put into the brutalities of speech. Yet a covenant of some sort was established without the help of words, for Mrs. Hastings gratefully kissed the cold hand she held.

Alone once more, Nora slowly climbed the darkening stairs. She knew that she would never again have any intimate intercourse with Barbara Hastings, who must of necessity avoid her in the future. Whatever possibilities of friendship had existed — and Nora dimly recognized such possibilities — had been destroyed by this hour of unbidden confidence. She felt a poignant pity for a grief as forlorn, as innocent, as unregistered, and as inarticulate as her own; a grief which would never have betrayed itself, had not her unhappiness — which no one else had fathomed — broken down the barriers of reserve. It was because Mrs. Hastings had looked at her with illumined eyes that the pain in their hearts had spoken. To Nora, whose mind revolved with tireless insistence around a single image,

such pain seemed the one natural thing on earth. She paused as she passed her brother’s room, and laid her cheek softly against the closed door. “ Tom, dear,” she said.