“My darling, yes. I would have lived for your sake if I could. You have been my comfort always. Comfort me a little longer. Let me feel that in all the future you will try to live nobly for my sake.”
The last words had been spoken with an evident effort, and it seemed to Helen that the cheek against which her own rested was already colder than it was half an hour ago.
She clung closer to the poor wasted form that was her whole world of love, and closed her lips over the bitter cry that was rising to them; and so the two lay, very, very quietly in that last embrace they were ever to know.
And the twilight gathered round them, and at last a young moon, hanging low in the western sky, looked in and touched with its pale glory the pale faces on the pillow.
The mother stirred a little, and with a last effort clasped her child closer, and said, in a voice like a sigh, faint and sweet and strange, “Good-by, darling!” and then she seemed to sleep.
Perhaps Helen slept, also. She never quite knew; but it was an hour afterwards when Woods touched her shoulder, and said, with a kind firmness in her tone,—
“You must get up now, Miss Helen, and leave her to me. She went off just as quiet as a lamb, poor dear, and if ever a face was peaceful and happy, hers is now.”
No one knew what the few days that followed were to Helen Ash. She shut her lips, as her manner was, over her grief. She turned away, with her great tearless eyes, from the two graves where her father and mother lay side by side, and she helped, with a strange unnatural calmness, in all the preparations for the long journey she was to take.
When at last she reached her aunt’s home in Boston, this strained, unnatural composure gave way a little.
Her Aunt Helen looked so much like her mother that at first she thought she could not bear it. Then, when her aunt’s arms closed round her almost as tenderly as her mother’s would have done, she shivered a little, and burst into one wild passion of tears, which almost instantly she checked.