It was then a strange, uncanny, desperate flash leapt into her eyes. Suddenly she withdrew her hand from the top of her head, but instantly pressed it to her brow.
In a moment her appearance underwent a great change. Under the continuous strain, the strands of grief and despair had at last snapped asunder and up rushed an exultation that instantly overwhelmed all opposition to a suddenly conceived and terrible purpose. She whispered with an earnestness intense as it was significant: “There is a way out.” Then she suddenly burst into a frenzy of pathetic joy as she thought of the phial of laudanum in the medicine chest in her room.
“A passage to my darling beyond!”
She did not see Virginia standing in the doorway, nor did she pause as some do to take a last farewell look at earth and sky. Her mind was set upon the swift accomplishment of an object.
Upon reaching her room, she took up the phial of laudanum and then, as she fell on her knees, locked her hands together, and her voice softened into tenderness—softened in inexpressibly sweet and plaintive tones, as she cried out in a whisper of her soul’s anguish:
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me!”
She was standing in the shadow of the valley of death.
Strangely coincident, the inspiring notes of the “Star Spangled Banner” softly broke upon the air from a piano in the music room below. As the grand strains swelled upward, they were met with a break in the clouds through which the sun poured down a flood of dazzling glory.
At that moment Dorothy’s pet canary began to sing. The delicate little feathered thing, that had nestled its bill under its wing in the raw cold of the morning, felt the warm influence of the sunshine that fell upon it, and looked up, twittered, lifted its voice in surprised gladness, and then in response to the soft strains that were pealing forth from the music room, broke into song.
Higher and higher it swelled, cleaving the air with its exultant melody.