Desire stood up and laid hers in them.

“It must be right.  You have come for me.  I cannot possibly do otherwise than this.”

The deep, gracious, divine fact had asserted itself.  A house here, or a house there could not change or bind it.  They belonged together.  There was a new love in the world, and the world would have to arrange itself around it.  Around it and the Will that it was to be wedded to do.

They stood together, hands in hands.  Christopher Kirkbright leaned over and laid his lips against her forehead.

He whispered her name, set in other syllables that were only for him to say to her.  I shall not say them over on this page to you.

But there is a line in the blessed Scripture that we all know, and God had fulfilled it to his heart.

Strangely—­more strangely than any story can contrive—­are the happenings of life put side by side.

As they sat there a little longer in the quiet library, forgetting the late evening hour, because it was morning all at once to them; forgetting Sylvie Argenter and her mother as they were at just this moment in the next room; only remembering them among those whom this new relation and joining of purpose must make surer and safer, not less carefully provided for in the changes that would occur,—­the door of the gray parlor opened; a quick step fell along the passage, and Sylvie unlatched the library door, and stood in the entrance wide-eyed and pale.

“Desire!  Come!”

“Sylvie! What, dear?” cried Desire, quickly, as she sprang to meet her, her voice chording responsive to Sylvie’s own, catching in it the indescribable tone that tells so much more than words.  She did not need the further revelation of her face to know that something deep and strange had happened.

Sylvie said not a syllable more, but turned and hurried back along the hall.

Desire and Mr. Kirkbright followed her.

Mrs. Argenter was sitting in the deep corner of her broad, low sofa, against the two large pillows.

“A minute ago,” said Sylvie, in the same changed voice, that spoke out of a different world from the world of five minutes before, “she was here!  She gave me her plate to put away on the sideboard, and now,—­when I turned round,”—­

She was There.

The plate, with its bits of orange-rind, and an untasted section of the fruit, stood upon the sideboard.  The book she had been reading fifteen minutes since lay, with her eye-glasses inside it, at the page where she had stopped, upon the couch; her left hand had fallen, palm upward, upon the cushioned seat; her life had gone instantly and without a sign, out from her mortal body.

Mrs. Argenter had died of that disease which lets the spirit free like the uncaging of a bird.

Hypertrophy of the heart.  The gradual thickening and hardening of those mysterious little gates of life and the walls in which they are set; the slower moving of them on their palpitating hinges, till a moment comes when they open or close for the last time, and in that pause ajar the soul flits out, like some curious, unwary thing, over a threshold it may pass no more again, forever.