And then, is it fancy? Is it some trick of his tortured brain? For as he watches, the dear lips move and it seems to him that the message they whisper to him with her dying breath is this: "It is not good-bye!"
He is holding her against his breast, he is kissing those lips that for the first time give not back kiss for kiss. He is calling to her from his aching, breaking heart, but she has passed beyond the sound of his voice, though the smile on her dead lips is still for him.
And those last words, were they real? Did they pass her lips with her dying breath, were they meant for him in pity and compassion and love?
"It is not good-bye!"
CHAPTER I
IN THE GARDEN OF DREAMS
A girl, a slip of a maid with sunny hair and wonderful blue eyes, stood beside a crumbling old rose-red brick wall. She looked up the long country road and she looked down it, there was no one, not a soul in sight. So she thrust the too of one small and broken boot into a crevice of the wall, made a little spring and caught at the top, then dragged herself up till she sat, flushed and triumphant, on the coping.
She was a village girl and her dress was of print, well washed, well mended, skimpy, too, for her slight figure, slender though it was, for it had been hers for three years, and a dress that is originally made for a maiden of fourteen is apt to be small when worn by a maid of seventeen.
It was a demure and a very sweet face, the eyes big and strangely dreamy, the white skin of her face and neck powdered lightly with tiny golden freckles, her hair a deep red gold.
And wonderful hair it was, wonderfully untidy, too, so rebellious that it spurned all hairpins and fretted and struggled agains ribbons and tapes.