“No tears for me!” she murmured gently.  “Basil!—­let me call you as your mother would call you if she was alive—­Basil! pray that I may be forgiven in the dreadful Eternity to which I go, as you have forgiven me!  And, for her?—­oh! who will pray for her when I am gone?”

Those words were the last I heard her pronounce.  Exhausted beyond the power of speaking more, though it were only in a whisper, she tried to take my hand again, and express by a gesture the irrevocable farewell.  But her strength failed her even for this—­failed her with awful suddenness.  Her hand moved halfway towards mine; then stopped, and trembled for a moment in the air; then fell to her side, with the fingers distorted and clenched together.  She reeled where she stood, and sank helplessly as I stretched out my arms to support her.

Her husband rose fretfully from his chair, and took her from me.  When his eyes met mine, the look of sullen self-restraint in his countenance was crossed, in an instant, by an expression of triumphant malignity.  He whispered to me:  “If you don’t change your tone by to-morrow!”—­paused—­and then, without finishing the sentence, moved away abruptly, and supported his wife to the door.

Just when her face was turned towards where I stood, as he took her out, I thought I saw the cold, vacant eyes soften as they rested on me, and change again tenderly to the old look of patience and sadness which I remembered so well.  Was my imagination misleading me? or had the light of that meek spirit shone out on earth, for the last time at parting, in token of farewell to mine?  She was gone to me, gone for ever—­before I could look nearer, and know.

* * * * *

I was told, afterwards, how she died.

For the rest of that day, and throughout the night, she lay speechless, but still alive.  The next morning, the faint pulse still fluttered.  As the day wore on, the doctors applied fresh stimulants, and watched her in astonishment; for they had predicted her death as impending every moment, at least twelve hours before.  When they spoke of this to her husband, his behaviour was noticed as very altered and unaccountable by every one.  He sulkily refused to believe that her life was in danger; he roughly accused anybody who spoke of her death, as wanting to fix on him the imputation of having ill-used her, and so being the cause of her illness; and more than this, he angrily vindicated himself to every one about her—­even to the servants—­by quoting the indulgence he had shown to her fancy for seeing me when I called, and his patience while she was (as he termed it) wandering in her mind in trying to talk to me.  The doctors, suspecting how his uneasy conscience was accusing him, forbore in disgust all expostulation.  Except when he was in his daughter’s room, he was shunned by everybody in the house.