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The Genius. Margaret Horton Potter
Madame Dravikine, seated in a corner, leaned back in her chair and let her heavy eyelids fall.
Presently, out of the night, came the voice of Ivan Veliki, from the distant Kremlin, booming the eleventh hour. As the last stroke trembled through the room and echoed into silence, Sophia Gregoriev lifted herself suddenly to a sitting posture. Her eyes widened, joyously, upon some distant scene, and a cry of ecstatic wonder broke from her lips. Then, in a breath, the divine light faded. The lips fell apart. It was her son who caught her as she fell.
Yet death held something still in store. Minutes later, as Ivan lifted himself heavily from his kneeling-place beside the bed, and gazed, through tear-filmed eyes, upon the face of his dead, there broke from him a little cry, a cry of joy. In its passage to freedom his mother's soul had stamped her visage with its state. From that face the lines of many years of anguish, mental and physical, had fallen away, leaving the flesh as smooth and fair as that of a girl. The eyes were lightly closed; and, most beautiful of all, her lips had slowly spread into a smile of such transfigured radiance as sent a thrill of intense and wistful longing through the hearts of those that looked on her.
The tragedy of Sophia Gregoriev was at an end; and none seeing her could doubt that she had found in the Unknown Land ample reason and compensation for her life on earth.
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