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 still. I heard the loud heavy beating of my own heart in the silence: that was all the sound there was. Suddenly she looked at me, and her mouth quivered, and she drew her breath with a little, low, quick sob. "I am all alone," she murmured, half with laughter, half with tears—"I am all alone!"

What could I think? I was so ugly, so grotesque, so poor, so utterly deserted by all fortune; and yet the gray street, the yellow light, the red carnations nodding at the window, the hard blue sky, with the white, thirsty leaves painted on it, all went round with me in a blind, sickly whirl. It was impossible!—and yet she looked at me and laughed a little, with her own old, sweet scorn at my madness, though her tears were falling. "Yes, do you hear?" she said low in her throat, so softly, and yet with such a pretty petulance. "Do you hear? You are so ugly, so absurd: you have a mouth like a frog and eyes like a fish, and yet you are good—you can say beautiful things, and—I am all alone!"

And then I knew her meaning. Ah, God! If only I could have died that day, when heaven itself seemed open to me!