"No, Harold, it is no good saying those things," burst out Helen. "As long as I live I shall always see father lying on his bed, too feeble almost to speak, and I shall have the feeling that it was for me. I try to forget it, but it always comes back. I should like to be able to do something very hard for him or for—mamma, just to prove how sorry I am."
"Did he really look as if he were going to die?" asked Harold rather irrelevantly.
Helen nodded. To speak the words again hurt her.
"I wonder what dying is like?" went on Harold.
Suddenly, and almost as he spoke, the sun dropped behind a bank of red clouds. A little breeze sprang up and murmured in the trees overhead.
Helen shuddered and drew closer to her companion.
"It must be very awful," he went on. "And to think that the world will go on just the same when we are gone. The sun will shine and the birds will sing, and we shall be lying in the dreadful cold earth. It is horrible."
"I used to think just like that once, Harold," whispered Helen half-shyly. "I was dreadfully afraid of all sorts of things. I used to think after I had been naughty that perhaps I should go to sleep and wake up in hell. One day I told Cousin Mary—you don't know Cousin Mary, do you? It is so easy to talk to her; one can tell her anything. She thinks that dying will be only like going to sleep in the dark. We shall be a little frightened, perhaps, but we shall know all the time that nothing bad can really happen to us. And if any pain comes to us afterwards it will be quite different from the pain that we suffer now—pain that will never make us impatient or angry, because we shall be able then to understand that it is bringing us nearer to God and heaven. Cousin Mary says that is the end of all pain, only we are not able to understand it quite now."
"Cousin Mary must say very odd things," observed Harold, who had been trying to fathom Helen's meaning, and who felt hopelessly puzzled. "Mother says that she is odd, and father says that some of her notions are not—I forget the word; but they never ask her to stay with us. Is she really very nice?"
"Very," answered Helen emphatically.