A bright, a glorious smile passed over her face, and she said, brokenly,—­“O! love,—­joy,—­peace!” gave one sigh and passed from death unto life!

“Farewell, beloved child! the bright, eternal doors have closed after thee; we shall see thy sweet face no more.  O, woe for them who watched thy entrance into heaven, when they shall wake and find only the cold gray sky of daily life, and thou gone forever!”

CHAPTER XXVII

“This Is the Last of Earth"*

     * “This is the last of Earth!  I am content,” last words of
     John Quincy Adams, uttered February 21, 1848.

The statuettes and pictures in Eva’s room were shrouded in white napkins, and only hushed breathings and muffled footfalls were heard there, and the light stole in solemnly through windows partially darkened by closed blinds.

The bed was draped in white; and there, beneath the drooping angel-figure, lay a little sleeping form,—­sleeping never to waken!

There she lay, robed in one of the simple white dresses she had been wont to wear when living; the rose-colored light through the curtains cast over the icy coldness of death a warm glow.  The heavy eyelashes drooped softly on the pure cheek; the head was turned a little to one side, as if in natural steep, but there was diffused over every lineament of the face that high celestial expression, that mingling of rapture and repose, which showed it was no earthly or temporary sleep, but the long, sacred rest which “He giveth to his beloved.”

There is no death to such as thou, dear Eva! neither darkness nor shadow of death; only such a bright fading as when the morning star fades in the golden dawn.  Thine is the victory without the battle,—­the crown without the conflict.

So did St. Clare think, as, with folded arms, he stood there gazing.  Ah! who shall say what he did think? for, from the hour that voices had said, in the dying chamber, “she is gone,” it had been all a dreary mist, a heavy “dimness of anguish.”  He had heard voices around him; he had had questions asked, and answered them; they had asked him when he would have the funeral, and where they should lay her; and he had answered, impatiently, that he cared not.

Adolph and Rosa had arranged the chamber; volatile, fickle and childish, as they generally were, they were soft-hearted and full of feeling; and, while Miss Ophelia presided over the general details of order and neatness, it was their hands that added those soft, poetic touches to the arrangements, that took from the death-room the grim and ghastly air which too often marks a New England funeral.