“Mr. Wingfold was with you. He gave you up to me, because he had to go into the town.”
He looked inquiringly at his sister as she came up, and she looked in the same way at Polwarth.
“I feel as if I had been lying all alone in this wide field,” said Leopold, “and as if Emmeline had been by me, though I didn’t see her.”
Polwarth looked after the two retiring forms, which were now almost at the end of the meadow, and about to issue on the high road.
Helen followed his look with hers. A sense of danger seized her. She trembled, and kept behind Leopold’s chair.
“Have you been coughing much to-day?” asked the gate-keeper.
“Yes, a good deal—before I came out. But it does not seem to do much good.”
“What good would you have it do?”
“I mean, it doesn’t do much to get it over. Oh, Mr. Polwarth, I am so tired!”
“Poor fellow! I suppose it looks to you as if it would never be over. But all the millions of the dead have got through it before you. I don’t know that that makes much difference to the one who is going through it. And yet it is a sort of company. Only, the Lord of Life is with you, and that is real company, even in dying, when no one else can be with you.”