"It is," she replied, smiling brightly in return as their hands clasped, thus by word and act renouncing her dearest hopes without his dreaming of the sacrifice.
With the opening of cold weather the seeming betterment in Mrs. Britton's health proved but temporary. As the winter advanced she failed rapidly, until, unable to sit up, she lay on a low couch, wheeled from room to room to afford all the rest and change possible. Day by day her pallor grew more and more like the waxen petals of the lily, while the fatal rose flush in her cheek deepened, and her eyes, unnaturally large and lustrous, had in them the look of those who dwell in the borderland.
She realized her condition as fully as those about her, but there was neither fear nor regret in the eyes, which, fixed on the glory invisible to them, caught and reflected the light of the other world, till, in the last days, those watching her saw her face "as it had been the face of an angel."
No demonstration of sorrow marred the peace in which her soul dwelt the last days of its stay, for the very room seemed hallowed, a place too sacred for the intrusion of any personal grief.
Turning one day to her husband, who seldom left her side, she said,—
"My sorrow made me selfish; I see it now. Look at the good you have done, the many you have helped; what have I done, what have I to show for all these years?"
Just then Darrell passed the window before which she was lying.