After

The family gathered round the bed.

The woman, released, expanding into light vapour, hovered near her body. When all that was corporeal had left her, she was still aware of a calm, painted intelligence. She regarded, without passion and without curiosity, the relatives who had come to mourn, aware with her thinning mind that her desire to "know how they'd take it" had lost its vindictiveness. For she had hated them. In the dragging months of illness she had lain tormenting herself with plans to tear them apart—emotionally, since she couldn't do it physically. She'd left her money to the housekeeper. After all their buttering up. And Arthur wouldn't enjoy reading those letters she'd willed him.

But that didn't matter now. Her little personality was safe. In death she was free. She knew everything didn't end when the lungs stopped sucking in air. She saw that the body beneath the smooth clothes had been twisted mentally and morally: knew no pity, but complete understanding.

There was no sensation of change, but the room seemed to become part of her as she diffused through it. "Like God the Holy Ghost—everywhere," she comprehended. The thought seemed weaker....

Then suddenly—she knew—

In a stillness beyond time she was dissolving as completely as the mermaid into her foam—breaking, diffusing . . . there was no eternal intelligence ... no understanding.

Very thinly—"I—regret—"

* * *

The doctor closed her eyelids.

"She's gone," he said. "She wandered a little towards the last."