She looked, rummaging gently among his poor things. She came on a small muslin pocket-handkerchief, stained with blood, also a loop of black ribbon of the kind that little girls tie their hair with. Some fine reddish hairs were still tangled in the knot. At last she found a small pocket Testament mixed up with some of his neckties. It was old and worn. Katherine wondered at that, though she could hardly have said why. Then she saw written on the fly-leaf, in a sprawling girl's hand, "Vincent, with Audrey's best love," and a date that went back to their childhood. It was the only present that Audrey had ever made him, and one that had cost her nothing.
"What part shall I read?"
She was afraid that Vincent would lay the burden of choice on her.
But he did not—he had very decided ideas of his own.
"The eighth of Romans, if you don't mind."
An eagle's feather floated out from between the pages at the eighth of Romans. It had been picked up on the snows of the Rocky Mountains. If she had wondered at first, she soon saw why Vincent had chosen that chapter of all others.
"Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
"For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." Vincent was dying.
She read on, and as she read she saw behind the edges of the veil that divides the seen from the unseen.
"For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope;