The Morning Post
came daily from London. 'I read my paper, write a letter, and the
morning's gone,' she told her daughter, by way of complaint that time
was so scanty. Mme. Cornu often heard her walking up and down the
floor, tapping her ebony stick and talking softly to herself. Yet she
was as sane as any old body living in solitude with evil thinking well
can be. She starved-because she neither gave nor _asked_.
As Mother thought of her, thus finding the way in instantly, the
church clock sounded midnight. She entered a room that was black as
coal and unsweetened as an airless cellar. The fair rays that had been
pouring out of her returned with a little shock upon themselves--
repulsed. She felt herself reduced, and the sensation was so
unpleasant at first that she almost gasped. It was like suffocation.
She felt enclosed with Death. That her own radiance dimmed a moment
was undeniable, but it was for a moment only, for, thinking instantly
of her friend, she drew upon that woman's inexhaustible abundance, and
found her own stores replenished.
Slowly, as a wintry sun pierces the mist in some damp hollow of the
woods, her supply of starlight lit up little pathways all about her,
and she saw the familiar figure standing by the window. The figure was
also black; it stood like an ebony statue in an atmosphere that was
thick with gloom, turgid, sinister, and wholly rayless.
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