Then she said, quite slowly, "They--have--taken off--their bonnets," and
fell upon the terrace like a dropped stone.
It was because of this that the girl said that she was dead when I was
born. It must have seemed almost as if she were not a living thing.
She did not open her eyes or make a sound; she lay white and cold.
The celebrated physicians who came from London talked of catalepsy
and afterward wrote scientific articles which tried to explain her
condition. She did not know when I was born. She died a few minutes
after I uttered my first cry.
I know only one thing more, and that Jean Braidfute told me after I grew
up. Jean had been my father's nursery governess when he wore his first
kilts, and she loved my mother fondly.
"I knelt by her bed and held her hand and watched her face for three
hours after they first laid her down," she said. "And my eyes were so
near her every moment that I saw a thing the others did not know her
well enough, or love her well enough, to see.
"The first hour she was like a dead thing--aye, like a dead thing that
had never lived. But when the hand of the clock passed the last second,
and the new hour began, I bent closer to her because I saw a change
stealing over her. It was not color--it was not even a shadow of a
motion. It was something else. If I had spoken what I felt, they would
have said I was light-headed with grief and have sent me away.
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