Then to me she beckoned.
“Come and hold my hand all the time. Clasp my fingers firmly. Do not let them go lest I slip away too soon, Quintin. I need your hand in mine—for to-night, Quintin, just only for this one night!”
Even thus Jean Gemmell and I were married.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
And after all was done I laid her on her bed, and she rested there till near the dawning with my hand firmly held in hers. Mostly her eyes were shut, but every now and then she would smile up at me like one that encourages another in a weary wait.
Once she said, “Isn’t it sweet?”
And then again, and near to the gloaming of the morn, she whispered, “It will not be long now, laddie mine?”
Nor was it, for within an hour the soul of Jean Gemmell went out in one long loving look, and with the faintest murmur of her lips which only my ear could catch—“Passing the love of women,” she said, and again—“passing the love of women!”
And it was my hand alone that spread the fair white cloth over her dead face which still had the smile upon it, and over the pale lips that she had asked me to kiss.
Then, as I stumbled blindly down the hill, I looked beyond the dark and sluggish river rolling beneath over to the Kirk of Crossmichael. And even as I stood looking, the lights in the windows went out. It was done. I was a man in one day widowed, forsaken, outcast.