This was but the husk of a human being, clinging beyond its appointed time to this world, so cruel and so kind.
They stood and gazed, solemnly, for a time.

The hands of Josephine St.Auban were raised in the sign of her religion.

Her lips moved in some swift prayer.

She could hear the short, hard breathing of the man who stood near her, grimed, blistered, disfigured, in his effort to bring away into the light for a time at least this specter, so long set apart from all the usual ways of life.
"She has been there for years," he said, at last, thickly.

"We kept her, I kept her, here for her sake.