"Patience," she had said.
"I will have patience," whispered Margaret, "even to the end," she added faintly, "for the morning cometh." She paused for a few moments, as if in enjoyment of new rest; but suddenly, as it were, the full import of her thought broke over her: "Earth holds my treasures," she cried passionately. "God forgive me! I cannot wish to leave them yet. Adèle, light the lamp and bring that green book from my table. An old story is haunting me to-night. It has followed me in my strange life, for sometimes it seems to me that I have loved the human too much. Will you read it for me, dear?"
She repeated some of the lines in a low tone:
"Then breaking into tears, 'Dear God,' she cried, 'and must we see
All blissful things depart from us or e'er we go to Thee?
Ay, sooth we feel too strong in weal to need Thee on that road,
But woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on God.'"
Adèle's eyes filled with tears: "Not to-night, dear, it sounds so dreary."
"Yes, to-night. I feel as if the good and evil were struggling together in my heart, and I have a certain craving to hear the old story, which long ago, when I was an uncomprehending child, used to move me to tears:
"'Onora! Onora! her mother is calling.'"
Adèle said no more. She began to read the "Lay of the Brown Rosary" in a soft low voice, that trembled often from excess of feeling. It seemed real and possible in the tremulous half light of the little room, the sound of boisterous winds and breaking waves running through it like a vivid illustration of its imagery; Margaret's fair face, in its pure delicate outline, her pale patient hands folded calmly, giving a kind of witness to its truth. She listened with apparent calm, but once or twice her face flushed, and now and then the tears would roll one by one down her pale cheeks.
Adèle read well. She knew how to put the true spirit of the scene into the words that represented them. She came to the third part, the spirits of good round the maiden's bed: