'But still, let me walk with you, and lean on me. I shall think you cannot bear my presence near you, if you refuse.'
'Be it so then.'
They left the chapel together. Not a word was spoken as they walked slowly on till Ellen paused before the gate of a villa.
'Good-bye, Eliza. We shall never meet again on earth. This third meeting, in which each first knows the other, is the last. Even if I lived, we could not be friends, our paths should lie far asunder; though your words, and still more your looks, tell me how it is with you, that we are sisters in disappointment and misfortune. But there'—she lifted her eyes, calm and serene, to the sky, where the moon, now fully risen, gleamed fair and radiant—'there we may meet and be friends for ever. Farewell, Eliza.'
Overcome with emotion, Eliza cast herself, weeping, on the other's breast. For a few moments they mingled their tears together. 'Farewell, Eliza;' 'Farewell, Ellen.' A faint breeze swept through the beechen wood. It came wandering by them, and seemed to murmur in unknown tongue some sentence or benediction over their heads.
There was silence. Eliza felt her companion lean heavily on her. She grew alarmed. At last she said: 'It is not well for you to linger in the night-air. Will you not go into the house now?'
Ellen replied not. Heavier and heavier she leant, with a helpless weight that almost over-powered the other. Eliza raised the drooping head. A white, white face, a dim fast-glazing eye, met her gaze. It was the dead that lay on her bosom.
That night Eliza was very ill, so ill that a telegram was despatched in haste to her husband to come at once, if he wished to see her alive. He arrived next day, but only in time to gaze on a sweet marble face, that changed not even in the presence of the dread remorse that then awoke in his heart, and to clasp in his arms a fair but lifeless child, whose tender eyes had never opened on this world's light—whose only baptism was tears.
A few days after Hallow-eve, Daly received a black-sealed letter. It was that which Eliza had written to him, but never sent.