Against his belief he promised.
He thought her sleeping. Her lips moved. “God! No man hath seen——. Beloved, we hav’n’t, have we?”
He was shaken with sobbing. He had to wait. “Dear little heart, you’ve been God to me and—and to everybody.”
“Hold my hand, Peter.” He was holding it. “I’m so tired. It’s night. Light the lamp. I want to see you.”
He unlatched the shutters. Across the dazzling blue of the gulf the sun stared luridly, swinging low above the sea-line.
Her brain began to wander. She spoke unforgettable things—unforgettable in their tenderness. It seemed that behind the confusion of her words her spirit was preparing him. It was as though she turned the pages of memory haphazard, chancing on phrases which summed up her short eighteen years of existence.
“Peter in a Christmas cab!” There was what he had called the laughter of birds in the way she said it. “Oh, it must be something splendid.”
She came to a winter when she had nearly died—when Peter had been sent for hurriedly from Sandport. “Peter! Peter! Peter!” She wailed his name childishly. Then, as though she snuggled warmly against one she trusted, “He’s never going to leave me. I shall get well now.”
For some minutes she was silent. Of a sudden she sat up, crying, “I don’t want to be a dead’un. I don’t want to be a dead’un.”
It all came back—his boyish attempt to explain heaven to her, and her terror because there was no means of escape by trains or trams. As then, so now, he failed to console her. She sank on the pillow exhausted by her panic.