These were the last words she uttered.
She died, Miss Pimpernell said, with a soft sigh of contentment and a smile of seraphic happiness on her face; and, the face of the dead girl—she added sobbing—looked like the face of an angel in its purity and innocence, and with the stamp of heaven on its lifeless clay.
She is buried in the churchyard where she and I so often mused and spoke of those who had gone before—little thinking that she would be so soon taken, and I, left desolate to mourn her loss.
Her grave is a perfect little garden.
Loving eyes watch it, loving hands tend it. A little, green, velvet-turfed mound is in the midst, planted round with all the flowers that she loved—snowdrops and violets in the early part of the year, roses and lilies in summer, little daisies always—for she used to say she liked them because others generally despised them.
I go there twice a day, morning and night. Her mother knows of my visits; but, we never meet, even there! She does not interfere with me; and I have buried the feud of the past in Min’s grave. There my heart finds only room for love and grief, ebbing and flowing in unison; coupled with a hope, which becomes more and more assured, now that I have received her message, that we shall yet meet again in that promised land where there is no death and no parting, only a sweet forgetfulness of the ills of life, and a remembrance of all its joy—the happy land of which my dream foretold in the early days of our love.
When I breathe the bloom of the flowers that rise from my darling’s resting-place in the early summer time, I almost experience peace! Her sainted presence must be watching over me, I am convinced; and, my soul expands with a desire and a resolve, so to guard my life, that I may hereafter obtain “the crown incorruptible” that now, I know, she’s wearing!
This is in summer.
But, in winter—winter which is connected by a thousand close and closer associations with her, I cannot so be content!—
It was at Christmas tide that I first spoke to her:—Christmas when we parted. On Christmas-eve we were to have met again:—it was Christmas when she died—