"Little sleeper!" said Winthrop, combing back with his fingers the golden curls, which returned instantly to their former position, — "she has done her work. She has begun upon her rest. I have reason to thank God that ever she lived. — I shall see the day when I can quietly thank him that she has died."
Elizabeth trembled, and in her heart prayed Winthrop not to say another word.
"Does not this face look, Miss Haye, as if its once owner had 'entered into peace?'"
If worlds had depended on Elizabeth's answering, she could not have spoken. She could not look at the eye which, she knew, as this question was put, sought hers; her own rested only on the hand that was moving back those golden locks, and on the white brow it touched; she dared not stir. The contact of those two, and the signification of them, was as much as she could bear, without any help. She knew his eye was upon her.
"Isn't it worth while," he said, "to have such a sure foothold in that other world, that the signal for removing thither shall be a signal of peace?"
Elizabeth bowed her head low in answer.
"Have you it?" was his next question. He had left the bed's side and stood by hers.
Elizabeth wrung her hands and threw them apart with almost a cry, — "Oh I would give uncounted worlds if I had! —"
And the channel being once opened, the seal of silence and reserve taken off, her passion of feeling burst forth into wild weeping that shook her from head to foot. Involuntarily she took hold of the bedpost to stay herself, and clung to it, bending her head there like a broken reed.
She felt even at the time, and remembered better afterwards, how gently and kindly she was drawn away from there and taken back into the other room and made to sit down. She could do nothing at the moment but yield to the tempest of feeling, in which it seemed as if every wind of heaven shook her by turns. When at last it had passed over, the violence of it, and she took command of herself again, it was even then with a very sobered and sad mind. As if, she thought afterwards, as if that storm had been, like some storms in the natural world, the forerunner and usher of a permanent change of weather. She looked up at Winthrop, when she was quieted and he brought her a glass of water, not like the person that had looked at him when she first came in. He waited till she had drunk the water and was to appearance quite mistress of herself again.