azure of the sky, the school children, the people who walked by, she thought of the deceased man. She thought of him so peacefully, so simply, without pain, without pity, that she was frightened at herself.
“I am going to his funeral,” she thought, “and yet I am walking as if I were out for pleasure,—unfeeling, dull. He is dead!” and there was a rumbling within her, “The only man who did not run away from poor me!”
In vain. The words resounded in her soul, but only distantly.
“How wretched I am, how dull I am!” she accused herself. “Who could forget so soon? And how can one forget at all?” But her soul could not enter into the circle of pain, from which she had escaped. With blinking eyes she looked about her in the heat of the sun, breathing freely, and she went on dreaming, God only knows what. . . .
Lucy reached the small bridge that
