The candle burnt at her head, the dog lay on her feet; but he
shivered; it seemed as though a coldness struck up to him from his resting-
place. She lay with folded hands, looking upward; and she heard the oxen
chewing, and she saw the two mosquitoes buzzing drearily round and round,
and her thoughts--her thoughts ran far back into the past.
Through these months of anguish a mist had rested on her mind; it was
rolled together now, and the old clear intellect awoke from its long
torpor. It looked back into the past, it saw the present; there was no
future now. The old strong soul gathered itself together for the last
time; it knew where it stood.
Slowly raising herself on her elbow, she took from the sail a glass that
hung pinned there. Her fingers were stiff and cold. She put the pillow on
her breast, and stood the glass against it. Then the white face on the
pillow looked into the white face in the glass. They had looked at each
other often so before. It had been a child's face once, looking out above
its blue pinafore; it had been a woman's face, with a dim shadow in the
eyes, and a something which had said, "We are not afraid, you and I; we are
together; we will fight, you and I." Now tonight it had come to this.
The dying eyes on the pillow looked into the dying eyes in the glass; they
knew that their hour had come.
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