“Can you see her now?”
“Yes,” was the faint reply, and for a moment there was silence, while the eyes of the dying man fixed themselves upon the face above them, as if they fain would take a semblance of those loved features up to heaven.
Then in tones almost inaudible he told her how happy she had made his short life, and blessed her as he had often done before.
“Mildred, Mildred, dear, dear Mildred,” he kept repeating, “in the better land you will know, perhaps, how much I love you, dear, darling Mildred.”
The words were a whisper now, and no one heard them save Mildred and Lawrence, who, passed his arm around his bride and thus encouraged her to sit there while the pulse grew each moment fainter and the blue eyes dimmer with the films of coming death.
“Haven’t you a word for me?” asked Hepsy, hobbling to his side, but his ear was deaf to her and his eyes saw nothing save the starry orbs on which they were so intently fastened.
“Mildred, Mildred, on the banks of the beautiful river I shall find again the little girl who made my boyhood so happy, and it will not be wicked to tell how much I love her,—Milly, Milly, Milly.”
They were the last words he ever spoke, and when Lawrence Thornton lifted the bright head which had bent over the thin, wasted face, Richard Howell, said to those around him:
“Oliver is dead.”
Yes, he was dead, and all the next day the villagers came in to look at him and to steal a glance at Mildred, who could not be persuaded to leave him until the sun went down, when she was taken away by Lawrence and her father.