That both suffered acutely I could tell by their looks when I carried my brief news. But pity for them I could not feel. It was all absorbed by the gentle girl whom between them they had brought to the threshold of the grim portal.
All through the hours of that long autumn day, the coma continued, until the doctor confessed his fear that she would pass away without even a minute's lapse into consciousness.
"If she should be conscious may I bring them to her?" I asked him when he was going away at nightfall.
"There is risk either way; but if she asks for them, bring them—for a minute only, however."
"There is no hope?
"If she lives through the night—yes; but..." and he shook his head very gravely.
In the evening the last solemn pathetic offices of the Church were solemnized; and through it all she remained unconscious—mercifully, as it seemed to me, since it would have roused her to the knowledge that she was dying.
I went back to my chair by the bed with a heart full of foreboding. I recalled the General's words—so sadly prophetic—"Whom the gods love, die young." The saying had galled me as he quoted it; but it did so no longer.
She looked so frail and fragile in her sickness; a tender floweret so utterly unable to bear up against the rough cross winds of anger and strife which, held in restraint only by her weakness, would assuredly burst forth to blight her life, that one could only feel with sad resignation that the dark verdict was the best for her happiness.
And yet so loving and passing sweet she was that with resignation to the will of Heaven was an irresistible, almost passionate, regret that she should go.