That was the last she ever spoke, and a moment after she was dead. In his fear lest the facts should be known to his guests, the host insisted that the body should be removed under cover of the night, and as Guy knew the railway officials would object to taking it on any train, there was no alternative except to bury it in town; and so there was brought to the room a close plain coffin, and Daisy helped lay Julia in it, and put a white flower in her hair and folded her hands upon her bosom, and then watched from the window the little procession which followed the body out to the cemetery, where, in the stillness of the coming day, they buried it, together with everything which had been used about the bed, Daisy's party dress included; and when at last the full morning broke, with stir and life in the hotel, all was empty and still in the fumigated chamber of death, and in the adjoining room, clad in a simple white wrapper, with a blue ribbon in her hair, Daisy sat with Guy's little boy on her lap and her namesake at her side, amusing them as best she could and telling them their mamma had gone to live with Jesus.
"Who'll be our mamma now? We must have one. Will oo?" little Daisy asked, as she hung about the neck of her new friend.
She knew it was Miss Mack-Dolly, her "sake-name," and in her delight at seeing her and her admiration of her great beauty, she forgot in part the dead mamma on whose grave the summer sun was shining.
The Thorntons left the hotel that day and went back to the house in Cuylerville, which had been closed for a few weeks, for Miss Frances was away with some friends in Connecticut. But she returned at once when she heard the dreadful news, and was there to receive her brother and his motherless little ones. He told her of Daisy when he could trust himself to talk at all, of Julia's sickness and death, and Miss Frances felt her heart go out as it had never gone before toward the woman about whom little Daisy talked constantly.
"Most bootiful lady," she said, "an' looked des like an 'ittle dirl, see was so short, an' her eyes were so bue an' her hair so turly."
Miss McDonald had won Daisy's heart, and knowing that made her own happier and lighter than it had been since the day when the paper came to her with the marked paragraph which crushed her so completely. There had been but a few words spoken between herself and Guy, and these in the presence of others, but at their parting he had taken her soft little hand in his and held it a moment, while he said, with a choking voice, "God bless you, Daisy. I shall not forgot your kindness to my poor Julia, and if you should need,—but no, that is too horrible to think of; may God spare you that. Good-bye."
And that was all that passed between him and Daisy with regard to the haunting dread which sent her in a few days to her own house in New York, where, if the thing she feared came upon her, she would at least be at home and know she was not endangering the lives of others. But God was good to her, and though there was a slight fever with darting pains in her back and a film before her eyes, it amounted to nothing worse, and might have been the result of fatigue and over-excitement; and when, at Christmas time, yielding to the importunities of her little namesake, there was a picture of herself in the box sent to Cuylerville, the face which Guy scanned even more eagerly than his daughter, was as smooth and fair and beautiful as when he saw it at Saratoga, bending over his dying wife.
[CHAPTER XIII.—DAISY'S JOURNAL.]
New York, June 14, 18—.
To-morrow I am to take my old name of Thornton again, and be Guy's wife once more. Nor does it seem strange at all that I should do so, for I have never thought of myself as not belonging to him, even when I knew he was married to another. And yet when that dreadful night at Saratoga I went to Julia's room, there was in my heart no thought of this which has come to me. I only wished to care for her and be a help to Guy. I did not think of her dying, and after she was dead, there was not a thought of the future in my mind until little Daisy put it there by asking if I would be her mamma. Then I seemed to see it all, and expected it up to the very day, six weeks ago, when Guy wrote to me, "Daisy, I want you. Will you come to me again as my wife?"