"I mean, do you remember how he died?"
Somehow—though, God knows, not at that dear and sacred remembrance—I shuddered. "Yes; but why should we talk of it now?"
"Why not? I have often thought what a happy death it was—painless, instantaneous, without any wasting sickness beforehand—his sudden passing from life present to life eternal. Phineas, your father's was the happiest death I ever knew."
"It may be—I am not sure. John," for again something in his look and manner struck me—"why do you say this to me?"
"I scarcely know. Yes, I do know."
"Tell me, then."
He looked at me across the table—steadily, eye to eye, as if he would fain impart to my spirit the calmness that was in his own. "I believe, Phineas, that when I die my death will be not unlike your father's."
Something came wildly to my lips about "impossibility," the utter impossibility, of any man's thus settling the manner of his death, or the time.
"I know that. I know that I may live ten or twenty years, and die of another disease after all."
"Disease!"