"I hate to bother you, but Miss Bertha sent up a lot of bonnets. Could you try them on now, dear?"
And—faintly, only faintly—Kate was interested in the way the bonnets became her. Joe always said black made her hair look brightest. But how heavy the long crêpe veils were.
"Kate, I can't help it. I never saw anything so becoming as that one with the fold of white," Carrie said, thickly, through the wad of her moist handkerchief, and Kate couldn't help thinking so, too.
And then the moment of respite was over. She remembered again, sinking to depth below depth, drowned in the waters of sorrow.
Life seems so solid, until those two seas of love and death surge through one, those deep seas whose tides are at flood, somehow, sometime, for all of us.
Bitterest, most heartbreaking, was the feeling that somehow she hadn't done enough to keep Joe from dying. She remembered his appealing eyes following her and her reassurance, more and more emphatic as her heart turned to ice, burning cold in her breast. He had believed her, and how had she kept her promises? The feeling that she was letting him die had flooded her before, unacknowledged, while she watched him melting away before her eyes—now, now, life is still in him, somehow we must keep it, somehow we can. And yet the unbelievable moment had come and gone, and Joe was dead. They had let him die. So love must feel forever.
