No tears came in her eyes and the quiver had left her lips.

She gazed at him calmly, trying perhaps to read the riddle of his smile.

And all the while Marie Delhasse looked down from under drooping lids.
I stepped up to the duchess' side.

She saw me coming and turned her eyes to mine.
"He looked just like that when he asked me to marry him," she said, with the simple gravity of a child whose usual merriment is sobered by something that it cannot understand.
I doubted not that he had.

Life, marriage, death--so he had faced them all, with scorn and weariness and acquiescence--all, save that one passion which bore him beyond himself.
The duchess spread the handkerchief again over the dead man's face, and rose to her feet.