"Any friends?"
"I have no friends."
"You have, then, no wish to see any one?"
"No. Stay," she says, as he turns to leave her, reaching out her hand to detain him; "are you quite sure that I shall die?" (Her lips quiver, and a slight shudder passes over her form, as she utters the words, "Is it quite certain?")
"It is impossible to be quite certain in any case," he answers, slowly; "while there is life, there is hope, you know; but—but—I cannot buoy you up with a false confidence."
She lies quiet a moment or two, regathering her spent strength. "How long do you think I shall live?"
"It is impossible to say exactly," he replies, gravely. "A few days—a few hours; one cannot be certain which."
Again she is silent, exhausted with the slight effort of framing a sentence. "Ask Mr. Gerard to come and see me—now—at once—before I die!"
He looks at her in astonishment, with a half-suspicion that she is light-headed; but her eyes look back at him with such perfect sanity in their clear depths, that he must needs abandon that idea. He cannot choose but undertake her commission at her bidding.
And St. John comes. They are singing the "Nunc Dimittis," which, saith Bacon, "is ever the sweetest canticle" in the Church, as he crosses the threshold of that room, and draws near that bed on which, but a few short nights ago, he had seen her, with his covetous lover's eyes, lying in all her round dimpled beauty. There comes no greeting blush now into her cheeks—the cheeks, that the sound of his far-off footfall had been wont to redden. How can she, that is the affianced of great Death, blush for any mortal lover? Her eyes lift themselves languidly to his face; and, even in the "valley of the shadow," dwell there comfortably; though in that countenance—never beautiful, and now made haggard by watching, with reddened eyelids and quivering muscles—a stranger would have seen small comeliness.