Explore "At Love's Cost" by Charles Garvice on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
By a stroke, as of Heaven's lightning, the house of joy was turned into the house of mourning.
They bore the dead man to his room, plain and simple, even in that mansion of luxury; the guests departed, some of them flying as from a pestilence, some of them lingering with white and dazed faces and hushed whispers, and Stafford was left alone with his dead; for he had shut the door even upon Howard, who paced up and down outside, not daring to force his sympathy upon his beloved friend.