She could feel nothing while she looked down at him.

When she tried to remember her young love she could recall but a shadow.

That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a memory.
As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what he had once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to revive the burning radiance of that summer when they had been lovers.

But a gray veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her mind, when she tried to bring back the emotions of seventeen years ago, became vacant.

For so long she had stoically put the thought of that past out of her life, that when she returned to it now, she found that only ashes remained.
Then a swift stab of pity pierced her heart like a blade, and she saw again, not George her lover, not George her husband, but the photograph Mrs.Fowler had shown her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth of curls over his lace collar.