"Nothing is the matter with me—nothing is the matter," she said, "except fatigue, and this change in the weather. If I only had more over me! and, perhaps, you had better give me a little brandy, or some such thing. This is water, isn't it, that you have been giving me?"
Alas! it was the strongest brandy; but there was no taste, and the hartshorn that they were holding had no smell. And there was no change in the weather; it was only the creeping deadness, affecting the whole outer and inner membrane of the system. Yet still her voice remained clear, though her mind occasionally wandered.
There is a strange impulse, which sometimes comes in the restlessness and distress of dissolving nature, to sing; and, as she lay with her eyes closed, apparently in a sort of trance, she would sing, over and over again, the verse of the song which she was singing when the blow of the unseen destroyer first struck her.
"The summer hath its heavy cloud,
The rose-leaf must fall;
But in our land joy wears no shroud,
Never doth it pall."
At last she opened her eyes, and, seeing the agony of all around, the truth seemed to come to her.
"I think I'm called!" she said. "Oh, I'm so sorry for you all! Don't grieve so; my Father loves me so well,—he cannot spare me any longer. He wants me to come to him. That's all—don't grieve so. It's home I'm going to—home! 'Twill be only a little while, and you'll come too, all of you. You are satisfied, are you not, Edward?"
And again she relapsed into the dreamy trance, and sang, in that strange, sweet voice, so low, so weak,—