“Oh, Frank, you have roused me to life again!” she moaned. “This story, it actually thrills me with hope! Yet—yet—how foolish I am! How could she be my daughter whose dead face I kissed in the coffin, whom I left in the old family vault among the dead-and-gone Van Dorns? But, oh, if I could only see her face! Do you think you can find her and bring her to me to-morrow?”
“I will try,” he replied, but he knew it would be no easy task. It seemed to him that Jessie Lyndon meant to hide herself from him.
She closed her eyes and lay still for a few moments, her bosom heaving with excited gasps, the color coming and going on her wasted cheeks.
Then she clutched his hand with her cold, damp fingers, crying:
“I cannot die till I have seen this girl who has a face like my dead child’s, Frank. Frank, I have a feverish fancy—perhaps a dying fancy! But will you try to gratify it?”
“Indeed I will,” he replied heartily.
“Bend closer, let me whisper it—for I shouldn’t like Cora or Suzanne to hear, and you will not betray me, will you?”
“Never, I promise you!”
“It is this: Go early to-morrow to the old family vault at Greenwood, make the sexton open it, and look in that white casket and see if Darling is still there, or—if her father has stolen her away and brought her to life again.”
It was the strangest fancy he had ever heard, and it made him shudder to think of that gruesome visit to the old Van Dorn vault, but we can refuse nothing to the dying.