Dicky Browne, bending over her (Roger has taken Dulce home), says:
"Oh, Portia! that it should end like this, and just now—now, when life had opened out afresh for him!" His voice is choked and almost inaudible. Now that he is gone, they all know how dear he has been to them, how interwoven with theirs has been his quiet melancholy life.
"I knew it," says Portia, not quickly, but yet with some faint, soft vehemence. "I am not surprised, I am not grieved." She whispers something else after this repeatedly, and Dicky, bending lower, hears the words, "And soon—and soon." She repeats them in an ecstatic undertone; there is joy and an odd certainty in it. They are the last words she ever spoke to him.
"He is very cold," she says then, with a little shiver.
Sir Mark, seeing the tears are running down Dicky's cheeks and that he is incapable of saying anything further, pushes him gently to one side, and murmurs something in Portia's ear. She seems quite willing to do anything they may desire.
"Yes, yes. He must come home. It will be better. I will come home with him." And then with a long-drawn sigh, "Poor Uncle Christopher!" This is the last time her thoughts ever wander away from her dead love. "It will be well to take him away from the cruel sea," she says, lifting her eyes to the rough but kindly faces of the boatmen who surround her. "But," piteously, "oh! do not hurt him!"
"Never fear, missy," says one old sailor, in a broken voice; and a young fellow, turning aside, whispers to a comrade that he was "her man" in tones of heartfelt pity.
Still keeping his head within her arms, she rises slowly to her knees, and then the men, careful to humor her, so lift the body that she—even when she has gained her feet—has still this dear burden in her keeping. At the very last, when they have laid him upon the rude bier they have constructed for him in a hurry, she still hesitates, and regards with anguish the hard spot where she must lay her burden down.
She gazes distressfully around her, and then plucks with a little mournful, helpless fashion at a dainty, fleecy thing that lies close to her throat, and is her only covering from the angry blast. One of the women divining her purpose, presses forward, and, in silence, folds her own woollen shawl and lays it on the bier, and then unfastening the white Shetland fabric round Portia's neck, lays that upon her own offering, so that the dead man's cheek will rest on it. Her womanly soul has grasped the truth, that the girl wants his resting-place to be made softer by some gift of hers; and when her task is completed, and the men, gathering up their load, silently prepare to move with it towards the old Court, Portia turns upon this woman a smile so sweet, so full of gratitude, that she breaks into bitter weeping, and, flinging her apron over her honest, kindly, sunburnt face, runs hurriedly away.
"She was his lass. Poor soul! poor soul!" says another woman in a hushed tone, and with deep pathos.