Was it quite a new thought, or was it because it had never come home to her in such a form before, this thought of Death? She started as if she had been stung.
“If I should die!” she echoed. “Die!”
“Phemie, my dear,” said Miss MacDowlas, opening the door, “the professor is waiting down-stairs.”
And so, having let her sorrow get the better of her, Phemie had no time to stay to see if her indiscretion had done harm. If she did not go now, she might not be allowed fresh grace; and so she was fain to tear herself away.
“I ought n't to have said it!” she bewailed, as she kissed Dolly again and again. “Please forget it; oh, do, please, forget it! I did not mean it, indeed! And now I shall be so frightened and unhappy!”
“Phemie,” said Dolly, quietly, “you have not frightened me; so you haven't the least need to trouble yourself, my dear.”
But she was not exactly sorry to be left alone, and when she was alone her thoughts wandered back to that first evening Phemie had called,—the evening she had gone to the glass to look at her changed face. She had sat in the basket-chair then,—she lay back upon her cushions now, and a crowd of new thoughts came trooping through her mind. The soft air was scented and balmy; the twilight sky was a dome of purple, jewel-hung; people's voices came murmuring from the gardens below; the far-off music floated to her through the window.
“If I should die!” she said, in a wondering whisper,—"I, Dolly Crewe! How strange it sounds! Have I never thought that I could die before, or is it strange because now it is so real and near? When I used to talk about death to Grif, it always seemed so far away from both of us; it seemed to me as if I was not good enough or unreal enough to be near to Death,—great, solemn Death itself. Why, I could look at myself, and wonder at the thought of how much I shall see and know if I should die. Grif, how much I should have to tell you, dear,—only that people are always afraid of spirits, and perhaps you would be afraid, too,—even of me! What would they say at home? Dear, old, broken-hearted fellow, what would you say, if I should die?”
She could not help thinking about those at home; about Aimée and Mollie and Phil and Toinette, sitting together in the dear old littered room at Bloomsbury Place,—the dear old untidy room, where she had sat with Grif so often! How would they all bear it when the letter came to tell them she was gone, and would never be with them and share their pleasures and troubles again! And then, strangely enough, she began to picture herself as she would look; perhaps, laid out in this very room, a dimly outlined figure, under a white sheet,—not her old self, but a solemn, wondrous marble form, before whose motionless, mysterious presence they would feel awed.
“And they would turn down the white covering and look at me,” she found herself saying. “And they would wonder at me, and feel that I was far away. Oh, how they would wonder at me! And, at the very last, before they hid my face forever under the coffin-lid, they would all kiss me in that tender, solemn way,—all but Grif, who loved me best; and Grif would not be there!”