She lowered her eyes and passed her hand over them, for now they were dazzled with shining gold. An ecstatic smile broke upon her lips.
“He died when the sun came into the room; a bridge of gold was set for him, and he passed painlessly into the open.”
“Oh, my poor child!”
Bella shook her head and smiled again.
“I’m not sorry; I’m glad that his suffering is over. He died so gently that at first I didn’t know it. I could hardly believe he was not asleep. I told father. And then I saw a lovely butterfly—a golden butterfly such as I’ve never seen before—hover slowly about the room. I couldn’t help looking at it, for it seemed to know its way, and then it came into the sunbeam and floated out along it—floated into the blue sky; and then I lost it.”
A week later Miss Ley was in London, where she meant to stay through August, partly because it bored her to decide where to spend that holiday season, partly because Mrs. Barlow-Bassett had been forced to go to a private hospital for an operation; but still more because Frank’s presence gave her the certainty that she would have someone to talk to whenever she liked. That month vastly amused her, for London gained then somewhat the air of a foreign capital, and since few of her acquaintance remained, she felt free to do whatever she chose without risk of being thought wilfully eccentric. Miss Ley dined with Frank in shabby little restaurants in Soho, where neither the linen nor the frequenters were of a spotless character; but it entertained her much to watch bearded Frenchmen languishing away from their native land, and to overhear the voluble confidences of ladies whose position in society was scarcely acknowledged. They went together to music-halls over the river or drove on the tops of ’buses, and discussed interminably the weather and eternity, the meaning of life, the foibles of their friends, Shakespeare, and the Bilharzia hæmatobi.
Miss Ley had left Bella and the Dean at Tercanbury. The widow never for a moment lost her grave serenity. She attended the burying of her husband with dry eyes, absently as though it were a formal ceremony that had no particular meaning to her; and the Dean, who could not understand her point of view, was dismayed, for he was broken down with grief, and it was his daughter who sought to console him. She repeated that Herbert was there among them now; and the furniture of the house, the roses of the garden, the blue of the sky, gained a curious significance, since he seemed to be in all things, partaking of their comfortable beauty, and adding to theirs a more subtle loveliness.
Soon Miss Ley received from her friend a letter, enclosing one from Herbert, scribbled in pencil but a few days before his death. She said:
“This is apparently for you, and though it is the last thing he ever wrote, I feel that you should have it. It seems to refer to a conversation that you had with him, and I am glad to have found it. My father keeps well, and I also. Sometimes I can scarcely realize that Herbert is dead, he seems so near tome. I thought I could not live without him, but I am singularly content, and I know that soon we shall be united, and then for ever.”
The letter was as follows: