  Three days later they laid him down by his wife. Until then Helen scarcely left him. And not once did her pitiful young calm break or waver. Stephen came from London. Latham’s telephone message had reached Pont Street before Pryde had. No word came of Hugh, no word or sign from him. They laid him in his coffin almost as they found him. Helen insisted that it be so. Much that when dead we usually owe to strange hands, to professional kindliness, the girl, who had not seen death before, did for this dead. The blackdraped trestle, the casket on it, was placed in the room where the tragedy that had killed him had fallen. He lay as if he slept, all the pain and doubt gone from his still face. Only one flower was with him—just one in his hand. And in the other hand he still held the odd Chinese carving. Helen had intended the costly trifle he had so affected—so often handled—it seemed almost a part of him—to remain with him. But, at last, something, some new vagary of Grief’s many piteous, puzzling vagaries, impelled her to take it from him. She scarcely left him all the hours he lay in his favorite room and took there his last homekeeping, there where he had lived so much of his life, done so much of his thinking, welcomed such few friends as he valued, read again and again the books he liked. He rested with Helen’s picture, radiant, gay-clad, smiling down on him serene and immovable, and Helen black-clad, pallid, almost as quiet,—moving only to do him some new little service, to give him still one more caress. It was their last tryst—kept tenderly in the old room where they had kept so many. Such trysts are not for chronicling. At the last—alone for the “good-by” that must be given—but never to be quite ended or done, live she as long as she may—Helen unclenched the cold—oh! so cold—fingers, and drew away the bit of jade. Sobbing—she had scarcely cried until now—she carried it to the writing-table, and put it just where it had always stood. “I want it, Daddy,” she said, smiling down wet-eyed on the still face. “You don’t know how much you handled it. I seem always to have seen it in your hand. No one shall touch it again but me—just yours and mine, Daddy—our little jade doll, in a pink cradle. Stay there!” she told the joss, and then sobbing, but pressing back her tears, and wiping them away when they would come, that her sight might be clear for its last loving of that dear, dead face, she bent over the coffin, spending their last hour together, saying—good-by. “Oh, Daddy—my Daddy——” The sobs came then, long and louder. Latham, watching in the hall, heard them, but he did not go to the girl; nor let any one else do so.
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