"Known her again!"—returned Miss Upton, with a brief smile. "I knew whom I was going to see, and therefore I could trace the features I was once familiar with. We were girls when we parted, young and blooming; now we are old women verging on the grave. Catherine retains her remarkable eyes, undimmed, unclouded. They are beautiful as ever; beautiful as yours."
Francis Grubb had heard so much of his eyes all his life, remarkable eyes, in truth, as Miss Upton called them, and very beautiful, that the allusion fell unheeded, if not unheard, on his ear. Something else in the words laid more hold upon him.
"Not verging on the grave yet, I trust: you. My dear mother will not, I fear, be spared long to us; but she has an incurable disease. Such is not your case, dear Miss Upton; and you should not talk so. You are young yet, as compared with many people. As, in fact, is my mother."
Margery Upton touched his arm, that he should look at her. "How do you know that I have not an incurable disease? Why should not such a thing come to me, as well as to your mother?"
Something in the tone, the earnest look, struck on him with fear. "It cannot be!" he slowly whispered.
"It is. I am dying, Francis. Dying slowly but surely. The probability is that I shall go before your mother goes."
He remembered how worn and weary he had thought her looking for some time past; how especially so on this same morning when she stopped him at the door of the Cavendish. He recalled a sentence, a word, that had fallen from her now and then, seeming to imply that she saw the close of life drawing near. Yet still, with all this presenting itself to him in a sudden mental effort, he could only reiterate: "It cannot be; it cannot be!"
"It is," she repeated. "I have suspected it for some time. I know it now."
A lump seemed to rise in his throat. How truly he esteemed and valued this good lady he never quite realized until this morning. She resumed.
"I know my friends, the few who consider they have a right to concern themselves about me, wonder that I should have come up to town so much more frequently during the past few months than I was wont to come. What I come for is to see my physician, Dr. Stair. I live too far off to expect him to come to me; and the journey does me no harm. I have an appointment with him tomorrow at eleven: after that, I return home."