"Happy!" he repeated with impatience.
"Yes, happy! and if I am not right, and this is indeed but a morbid fancy, it will have done you no harm to hear it. You have listened to many a fancy of mine, dear old friend."
Tears gathered in her eyes now, and two large drops fell from the dark eyelashes unheeded.
"I have, I have," he said, "but to what fancies! How can you speak thus, Margaret? How can you think so calmly of leaving those who love you so much, those in whose love you confess you have found so much happiness? Your husband, your child, your father!"
"I cannot tell you," she said; "I cannot explain it, and because I cannot I am forced to believe it, to feel that it is so. The world seems far away from me somehow, even my own small precious world. You remember, when I spoke to you before, I told you how much I dreaded the effect of what had happened on myself, on my own feelings--how strangely the sense I have always had of being so much older than my husband, the dread of losing the power of enjoying the great happiness of my life, had seized hold of me?"
"I remember."
"Well," she continued, "all this fear has left me now--indeed, all fear of every kind, and the power of suffering, I think. When I think of the grief of those I shall have to leave, if my presentiment is realised, I don't shrink from it as I did when the first thought of the possible future came to me. After all, it is for such a little, little time."
Her eyes were raised upwards to the light, and a smile which the listener could not bear to see, and yet looked at--thinking, with the vain tenderness so fruitful in pangs of every kind and degree of intensity, that at least he never, never should be unable to recall that look--came brightly over her face, and slowly faded.
"O, no, Margaret; life is awfully long--hopelessly long."
"It seems so sometimes, but it has ceased to seem so to me. You must not grieve for what I am saying to you. If all is what you will think right with me, and we are here together again, you will be glad to think, to remember how I told you all that was in my heart; if it is otherwise, you will be far more than glad, James."