"'My dust would hear you and beat had I lain for a century dead,'" she repeats softly. "There is fiber as well as music in that idea; I like it. 'Had I lain for a century dead'—the old tune of the immortality of love, Tom, sung by poets and psalters since the world began. And so you think your dusty old heart would feel me, your drumless ear would hear me a century hence?" Then, after a pause, looking up into his face with a twitching mouth that brings a dead dimple to life—"But suppose, Tom—suppose my second husband carried the watering-pot—would your dust blossom into purple and red then?"
"You little Goth! You soulless barbarian!" he exclaims, in mock indignation. "Catch me ever dropping out of prose for your edification again!"
"There—don't be cross; I'll always leave him at home when I come to call on your poor ghost. Now are you satisfied?"
The stars come out, faintly studding the purple vault of heaven; a tiny breeze sweeps the budding world, bringing to the sick girl the perfume of a thousand flowers, telling her of the sweets and the joys, the bloom of the coming summer, which she may never know.
"'Were it ever so airy a tread,
My dust would hear you and beat
Had I lain for a century dead,'"
she repeats softly; then, suddenly starting to her feet with a peevish wailing cry—"Why do you talk to me of death—death, only death? Oh, I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I tell you! I can not die now—it would be double death! I am so young, I have suffered so"—sinking upon her knees and clasping her hands piteously—"not yet, dear Heaven, ah, not yet! Give me this summer—this one summer; it is all I ask! Tom, why don't you speak—why don't you look at me? Ah, you have no hope—no hope! I saw it in their faces to-day; I see it in yours every time you look at me. You know I'm doomed—you know I'm doomed!"
"I know nothing, nothing," he answers, in a smothered voice, clasping her to his breast and kissing the tears from her gray scared face, "but that they say that the Almighty's power is great and His mercy infinite."
"And I have one lung left, you know; I have one lung left!" she pleads peevishly. "The doctors at the hospital told me that; and people have been known to live for years with one lung, with great care and love. And I have both—I have both! I ought to last the summer; it is so near now; the roses are budding outside the window, the apple trees are white with blossom—it is so near! Oh, Tom, my love, my life, keep me with you this one summer, this one summer, please!"
She lives to see the summer, to see the tall daisies and sleepy cowslips bow their scorched heads to the dust, and the roses drop leaf by leaf from their thorny stem—lives to welcome the golden sheaves of autumn; and, when the first bud shrivels in the grove, she is carried, not to that quiet garden behind the church to lie beside her mother, but to the balmy shores of Algiers, where summer meets her again and lingers with her so kindly and helpfully that three years go by before Tom Armstrong sets eyes on the tall chimneys of his native town again.