While he was at dinner a message came from the Pavilion for him and for Zilla. The end was coming sooner than they had imagined it would.
Zilla hesitated about going; not that she feared death, for she had seen many people die, but from purely selfish motives. It was a rainy evening, and she would rather stay at home and read one of her beautiful books than to go out to witness the end of a person who was utterly uninteresting to her.
“I cannot wait,” said Camperdown, “and I think that you ought to come with me. There is a cab at the door; you won’t have to walk.”
Zilla flashed him a swift glance, darted upstairs for her cloak, and went with him.
It was certainly not a hateful sight that they witnessed when they left the rain and darkness of the street and entered Stargarde’s cheerful rooms. Every light was shining brightly. Mrs. Frispi’s sight was almost gone, and to enable her to see some objects in the room that she dearly prized, Stargarde had even had additional lights brought in.
The woman lay quietly among the pillows of her snow-white bed, the gaunt framework of her bones almost piercing through the thin covering of skin. Stargarde sat by the bed and in a recess was a girl dressed in the uniform of the Salvation Army.
“It is no use,” Mrs. Frispi was uttering in short gasping breaths, as Camperdown and Zilla paused in the doorway; “I can’t see them—tell me.”
Around Stargarde’s room hung a number of paintings illustrating an old hymn that she was fond of singing.[singing.] Two years before an English artist, poor and drunken and expelled from his native land, had found a shelter till his death in the Pavilion. In gratitude for Stargarde’s kindness to him, he had painted a series of pictures for her, representing the adventures of the wayworn traveler that he had so often heard her singing about to a quaint, wild tune.
On these paintings hanging around her bed Mrs. Frispi’s eyes had often rested, and Stargarde, thinking that no more applicable story could be framed to suit her mother’s circumstances, had, in talking to her, woven biblical truths with the progress of the weary traveler. The striking pictures and the graphic words had impressed themselves upon the sin-worn mind. Even now, when her earthly vision was dulled, the dying one had before her mental gaze the representations of the traveler toiling up the mountain, his garments worn and dusty, his step slow, his eyes turned resolutely from the enchanting arbors where sweet songsters invited his delay to the top of the mountain, beyond which were the heavenly vale and the golden city.
“While gazing on that city,”