"Meg, Meg! Is it you really? Will you vanish, if I kiss you? Is it safe to try?" she asked under her breath.
Meg leaned forward, without releasing her hand, and they kissed softly.
"I shall stay—till the end," she whispered in return.
So, very quietly and gently, Margaret Thorpe stole back to the place Meg Deane had left; but knew, even while her heart was filled with thankfulness, that, though the place might be the same, yet the girl who had left it would return no more.
Mr. Deane woke with a contented smile on his lips. "I dreamt of you, my Meg," he said. And, from that moment, he seemed to have simply put aside all that had happened since Meg had been his spoilt darling of long ago.
His mind wandered to her nursery rather than to her girlish days—to that very far away time, before Mrs. Russelthorpe's reign, when his little girl had sat on his knee, and ruled him with sweet baby tyranny.
Margaret tried once to recall his mind to the present; for her heart ached for a few words that she might treasure—words spoken to her real and womanly self; but the attempt distressed him, and she gave it up.
She slept on the sofa in his room; for he became uneasy when she was out of his sight; but the ebbing away of his life was quiet and gradual as the ebb of a summer sea.
Perhaps the faculty he had always possessed of forgetting troublesome matters helped to make his last days happy.
Apparently he utterly forgot the existence of the preacher. The grown-up daughter had given him more pain than pleasure; but the baby girl had been an unmixed joy. He loved to call her by the old pet names of her childhood. Laura, who came every day, watched her sister wonderingly. Once, when Meg playfully answered some allusion to an old family joke, Laura felt a sudden longing to thrust aside the veil, to ask Meg about all the strange experiences that were surely in the background, to beg her to say whether the preacher was kind or cruel to her; but they both refrained from bringing any subject into that chamber which was already sanctified by the approach of the great healer.