"Say that you love me, Evelyn, just once more—I can then die happy."
"Claude Bainrothe, arise—unhand me—this is child's play—let me breathe freely again. Well do you know I love you. O God! why do you return to a theme so bitter and profitless to both? Come, let us look together on Miriam sleeping, and gather strength and courage from such contemplation. Come, my friend!"
The curtains were lifted—still I lay rigidly and with closed eyelids before them—not from any notion of my own, but from the helplessness of my agony and the condition into which I was fast drifting. Once or twice during the progress of this conversation I had tried to lift my voice, my hand—both were alike powerless. I lay bound, for a while, in a cataleptic reverie, and then I passed away once more into darkness and syncope.
It was evening when I revived—Dr. Pemberton was sitting beside me, holding my pulse—Mrs. Austin and Mabel were at the bedside. This was, at last, the end I craved; of all, I hoped.
"The wine, Mrs. Austin," the doctor said, in low accents.
"Quick! one spoonful instantly. You know how it was before—you were too slow; she fell back before she could swallow it.—Now another, Miriam. Say, are you better?"
Most anxiously as my eyes opened and were fixed upon his face, were these words spoken:
"No, dying, I believe—at least, I hope so!"
The shrieks of the child aroused me to a sense of what I owed myself and her. "You shall not die, sister Miriam," she cried. "Papa does not want you—I want you—I will not stay with Evelyn and Claude—I will go down in the ground too, if you die. My sister, you shall not go to God! I will hold you tight, if He comes for you. He shall not have my Miriam—nor His angels either."
Her cries did for me what medicine had failed to do. They tried in vain to silence her. My pulse returned under the stimulus of emotion. I put out my hand blindly to Mabel.