![]() There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. There would be no one to live for during those coming years she would live for herself. ![]() And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. ![]() But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She said it over and over under the breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will-as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. What was it? She did not know it was too subtle and elusive to name. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message. ![]() Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
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