There were many worries on his mind. For ohing, Alice was not well. She worked downstairs as usual from seven in the m until ten at night, but she walked very slowly and brown circles were beh her eyes. It was in the busihat she showed this illness most plainly. One Sunday, when she wrote out the days menu oypewriter, she marked the special dinner with chi a la king at twenty ts instead of fifty, and did not discover the mistake until several ers had already ordered and were ready to pay. Aime she gave back two fives and three ones as ge for ten dollars. Biff would stand looking at her for a long time, rubbing his houghtfully and with his eyes half-closed.
They did not speak of this together. At night he worked downstairs while she slept, and during the m she mahe restaurant alone. When they worked together he stayed behind the cash register and looked after the kit and the tables, as was their . They did not talk except on matters of business, but Biff would stand watg her with his face puzzled.
Then iernoon of the eighth of October there was a sudden cry of pain from the room where they slept. Biff hurried upstairs. Within an hour they had taken Alice to the hospital and the doctor had removed from her a tumor almost the size of a newborn child. And then within another hour Alice was dead.
Biff sat by her bed at the hospital in stunned refle. He had bee when she died. Her eyes had been drugged and misty from the ether and then they hardened like glass.
The nurse and the doctor withdrew from the room. He tio look into her face. Except for the bluish pallor there was little difference. He noted each detail about her as though he had watched her every day for twenty-one years.
Then gradually as he sat there his thoughts turo a picture that had long been stored inside him.
The cold green o and a hot gold strip of sand. The little children playing on the edge of the silky line of foam. The
sturdy brown baby girl, the thin little naked boys, the half-grown children running and calling out to each otherwith sweet, shrill voices. Children were here whom he knew, Mid his niece, Baby, and there were alse young fao one had ever seen before. Biff bowed his head.
After a long while he got up from his chair and stood in the middle of the room. He could hear his sister-in-law, Lucile, walking up and down the hall outside. A fat bee crawled across the top of the dresser, and adroitly Biff caught it in his hand and put it out the open window. He gla the dead faore time, and then with widowed sedateness he opehe door mat led out into the hospital corridor.
Late the m he sat sewing in the room upstairs.
Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each sed swells to an unlimited amount of time and he is watched by many eyes? Because there is a fun he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurre of the beloved—so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a sed time in the soul of the living? Why？
Biff bent close over his sewing aated on many things.
He sewed skillfully, and the calluses oips of his fingers were so hard that he pushed the needle throug