'What a promise?'
'O, but you know, ma'am—I mean, it was give to me, and so I promised. When folks give you things they always expect you never to take 'em off.'
'Do they?' said Wych Hazel. But then she launched forth into the account of all the day's distress, electrifying her listener with some of the fear and excitement so long pent up. Yet the mill girl's comment was peculiar.
'It does make a person feel very solemn to be so near to death.'
'Solemn!' cried Wych Hazel. 'Is that all you would feel,
Phoebe?'
'I'm not much afraid of pain, you know, ma'am—and if the fire took it couldn't last long.'
'But Phoebe;—' she sat straight up on her floury cushions, looking at the girl's quiet face. 'What do you mean, Phoebe?'— She could not have told what checked the expression of her growing wonder.
'O lie down, ma'am, please! Why I only mean,' said Phoebe speaking with perfect simplicity—'You know God calls us all to die somehow—and if he called me to die so, it wouldn't make much difference. I shouldn't think of it when I'd got to heaven.'
Again some undefined feeling sealed Wych Hazel's lips. She lay down as she was desired, and with her hand over her eyes thought, and wondered, and fell asleep.
For some hours thereafter the sunbeams were hardly quieter than the party they lighted on the miller's floor. Wych Hazel slept; Mrs. Saddler was even more profoundly wrapped in forgetfulness; Mr. Falkirk sat by keeping guard. The miller's daughter had run up the hill to her home for a space. As to Rollo, he had not been seen. His gun was his companion, and with that it was usual for him to be in the woods much of the time. He came back from his wanderings however as the day began to fall, and now sat on a stone outside the mill door, very busy. The little lake at his feet still and dark, with the side of the woody glen doubled in its mirror, and the sunlight in the tops of the trees reflected in golden glitter from the middle of the pool, was a picture to tempt the eye: but Rollo's eye, if it glanced, came back again. He was picking the feathers from a bird he had shot, and doing it deftly. Sauntering leisurely up the miller approached him.