"Desire! Come!"
"Sylvie! What, dear?" cried Desire, quickly, as she sprang to meet her, her voice chording responsive to Sylvie's own, catching in it the indescribable tone that tells so much more than words. She did not need the further revelation of her face to know that something deep and strange had happened.
Sylvie said not a syllable more, but turned and hurried back along the hall.
Desire and Mr. Kirkbright followed her.
Mrs. Argenter was sitting in the deep corner of her broad, low sofa, against the two large pillows.
"A minute ago," said Sylvie, in the same changed voice, that spoke out of a different world from the world of five minutes before, "she was here! She gave me her plate to put away on the sideboard, and now,—when I turned round,"—
She was There.
The plate, with its bits of orange-rind, and an untasted section of the fruit, stood upon the sideboard. The book she had been reading fifteen minutes since lay, with her eye-glasses inside it, at the page where she had stopped, upon the couch; her left hand had fallen, palm upward, upon the cushioned seat; her life had gone instantly and without a sign, out from her mortal body.
Mrs. Argenter had died of that disease which lets the spirit free like the uncaging of a bird.
Hypertrophy of the heart. The gradual thickening and hardening of those mysterious little gates of life and the walls in which they are set; the slower moving of them on their palpitating hinges, till a moment comes when they open or close for the last time, and in that pause ajar the soul flits out, like some curious, unwary thing, over a threshold it may pass no more again, forever.