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From a far corner of the room her husband gazed upon her, and bathed his senses in contemplation of her beauty while his soul soared with her song. Mother Clemm noiselessly passing near him to snuff a candle on the table upon which his elbow, propping his head, rested, paused for a moment and laid a caressing hand upon his hair. He impulsively drew her down to a seat beside him.

"Oh, Muddie, Muddie, look at her—look at her!" he whispered. "There is no one anywhere so beautiful as my little wife! And no voice like hers outside of Heaven!... Ah—"

What was the matter? Was his Virginia ill? Even as he spoke her voice broke upon the middle of a note—then stopped. One hand clutched the harp, the other flew to her throat from which came only an inarticulate sound like a struggle for utterance. Terror was in the innocent eyes and the deathly white, baby face.

For a tense moment the little company of birthday guests sat rooted to their places with horror, then rushed in a mass toward the singer, but her husband was there first—his face like marble. His arms were around her but with a repetition of that inarticulate, gurgling sound she fell limp against his breast in a swoon. From the sweet lips where so lately only melody had been a tiny stream of blood oozed and trickled down and stained her pretty white dress.

"Back!—All of you!" commanded the low, clear voice of Edgar Poe, as with the dear burden still in his arms he sank gently to the floor and propping her head in his lap, disposed her limbs in comfortable, and her dress in orderly manner. "Back—don't crowd! A doctor!"

One of the guests from nearby, who knew the neighborhood, had already slipped from the door and gone to fetch the nearest doctor. The others sat and listened for his step in breathless stillness.

Edgar Poe bent his marble face above the prostrate form of his wife, calling to her in endearing whispers while, with his handkerchief he wiped from her lips the oozing, crimson stream. His teeth chattered. Once before he had seen such a stream. It was long ago—long ago, but he remembered it well. He was back—a little boy, a mere baby—in the small, dark room behind Mrs. Fipps' millinery shop, in Richmond, and a stream like this came from the lips of his mother who lay so still, so white, upon the bed. And his mother had been dying. He had seen her thus—he would see her nevermore!... Would the doctor never come?—

Many days the Angel of Death spread his wings over the cottage in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. Their shadow cast a great stillness upon the cottage. Outside was a white, silent world. Snow had fallen—snow on snow—until it lay deep, deep upon the garden-spot and deep in the streets outside. There was no wind and the ice-sheathed trees that were as sentinels round about the cottage stood still. They seemed to listen and to wait.

Inside, in the bed-chamber upstairs, under the shelving walls of the low Dutch roof, The Dreamer's heartsease blossom lay broken and wan upon the white bed. It was a very white little blossom and the dark eyes seemed darker, larger than ever before as they looked out from the pale face. But they had never seemed so soft and a smile like an angel's played now and again about her lips.

Beside her, with his lips pressed upon the tiny white hand which he held in both his own was the bowed figure of a man—of a poet and a lover who like the ice-sheathed trees seemed to listen and to wait—of a man whose countenance from being pale was become ghastly, whose eyes from being luminous were wild with a "divine despair."

At the foot of the bed sat a silver-haired woman with saintlike face uplifted in resignation and aspiration. For once the busy hands were idle and were clasped in her lap. She too, listened and waited, as she had listened and waited for days. Oh Love! Oh Life! Are these the happy trio who lived for each other only in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass?

The silence was only broken when the lips of the invalid moved to murmur some loving words