“She is too far gone, poor lassie,” was the answer; “it would be mere cruelty to torment her. You had better go and lie down, Miss Curtis; her mother and I can do all she is like to need.”
“Is she dying?”
“I doubt if she can last an hour longer. The disease is in an advanced state, and she was in too reduced a state to have battled with it, even had it been met earlier.”
“As it should have been! Twice her destroyer!” sighed Rachel, with a bursting heart, and again the kind doctor would have persuaded her to leave the room, but she turned from him and came back to Lovedy, who had been roused by what had been passing, and had been murmuring something which had set her aunt off into sobs.
“She’s saying she’ve been a bad girl to me, poor lamb, and I tell her not to think of it! She knows it was for her good, if she had not been set against her work.”
Dr. Macvicar authoritatively hushed the woman, but Lovedy looked up with flushed cheeks, and the blue eyes that had been so often noticed for their beauty. The last flush of fever had come to finish the work.
“Don’t fret,” she said, “there’s no one to beat me up there! Please, the verse about the tears.”
Dr. Macvicar and the child both looked towards Rachel, but her whole memory seemed scared away, and it was the old Scotch army surgeon that repeated—
“‘The Lord God shall wipe off tears from all eyes.’ Ah! poor little one, you are going from a world that has been full of woe to you.”
“Oh, forgive me, forgive me, my poor child,” said Rachel, kneeling by her, the tears streaming down silently.