“But, my darling, you should not give way to this grief. It may render you seriously ill.”
“Oh, Thomas! how can I help it?” she returned, with emotion, as the tears dropped swiftly over her cheeks. “We begin to see that there is no chance of Sarah Anne’s recovery. Mr. Snow told mamma so to-day: and he sent up Mr. Hastings.”
“Ethel, will your grieving alter it?”
Ethel wept silently. There was full and entire confidence between her and Thomas Godolphin: she could speak out all her thoughts, her troubles to him, as she could have told them to a mother—if she had had a mother who loved her.
“If she were only a little more prepared to go, the pain would seem less,” breathed Ethel. “That is, we might feel more reconciled to losing her. But you know what she is, Thomas. When I have tried to talk a little bit about heaven, or to read a psalm to her, she would not listen: she said it made her dull, it gave her the horrors. How can she, who has never thought of God, be fit to meet Him?”
Ethel’s tears were deepening into sobs. Thomas Godolphin involuntarily thought of what Mr. Hastings had just said to him. His hand still rested on Ethel’s head.
“You are fit to meet Him?” he exclaimed involuntarily. “Ethel, whence can have arisen the difference between you? You are sisters; reared in the same home.”
“I do not know,” said Ethel simply. “I have always thought a great deal about heaven; I suppose it is that. A lady, whom we knew as children, used to buy us a good many story-books, and mine were always stories of heaven. It was that which first got me into the habit of thinking of it.”
“And why not Sarah Anne?”
“Sarah Anne would not read them. She liked stories of gaiety and excitement; balls, and things like that.”