eat food mingled with ashes; and the doctor came to look at her, -not that he could do any good; but we all cling to the rock from which we know the waves are certain to wash us. When the girl awoke from her last sleep, and looked restlessly about her, John came forward. Oh, dear old man,' she whispered, with the parting bitterness full on her, 'must I really die?' Dr. Percival came in and read the prayers for the dying, and Serena came all tearful for a farewell word. 'You will be very happy,' said Chloe; I leave him as a legacy to you, Serena,' with a flash of her old mischief. To Joseph she gave her hand, Serena will console you: "Sober, steadfast, and demure."' He went away much aggrieved; she certainly possessed the power to annoy him to the last. Yet Serena had been already consoling him that afternoon. He had wandered dismally to the vicarage, and received Serena's pious comforts. The summer afternoon had slipped away while they sat in her cool drawingroom. She had made him a cup of strong tea, and stood beside him while he drank it. She was dressed in some dark stuff that harmonised with their melancholy. There was the secret of her charm for him; she harmonised, what there was of her-whereas Chloe was full of contrasts. When the leave-takings were over, the aunts went to rest for a while, for they were worn out by sorrow, and John took up his old position beside his darling, tasting with her the dolefulness of death, soothing her fear of loneliness by telling her of the warm hand and welcome of the Elder Brother waiting for her on the other side. She grew content as he pictured their meeting in a short time-who knew how short? 'But you will not let your life be spoilt by this, dear. God has let me learn more by this than I can tell you; perhaps I should have continued giddy, you know, and you are so far above You will not be sorry to have loved me?' me. 6 'I swear,' he answered, that for no love of wife or children in past time, would I have missed these few blessed hours with my girl.' 'But you will not grieve too much?' anxiously. 'No,' said he, bravely, I will fill the years with work, serving for my love, as Jacob did for Rachel, till the years shall seem short.' Nurse wiped her eyes in the dimness beyond. At that turn of the night, when the pulse of the world beats low, the change came. After long silence, she spoke suddenly, gladly, freely— 'I am glad to die, but I do wish you could come with me; good-bye, dear;' and breathed out her life against his heart. CHAPTER VI. Could we forget the widowed hour, When first she wears the orange Ан, could we! Humanity answers, No. flower! That' widowed hour,' so empty of all consolation that the soul shrinks back appalled while eternity opens before it, the chief mourner spent alone. When even the 'De Profundis' is inarticulate, no eye but that of God should be on us. There were sobs in the chamber out of which a spirit had just passed, sobs of the bereaved women, rebuked by the calmness of the dawn which stole in and lay about her, before it melted into the rosiness of day which is so full of vitality that it mocks at death. So they drew down the blinds and shut it out, and laid white flowers about her, and crossed the lately busy hands on the breast: Two hands upon the breast and labour's done,' says the Russian proverb; but it seems strange, that crossing of the hands of those whose labour has not yet begun. John felt it most when, having laid aside the withered roses which her hands had held, he came to look at the fair corpse, sculptured in Death's marble, cold with that intense coldness which only belongs where there has been life. Then he chose her grave, not within the church, where the kneeling hamlet drains the chalice of the grapes of God,' but outside in the sunshine, where the willows waved. She had pointed once to the spot half-jestingly, and said that she should like to be buried there, and sung in an undertone: Wave willows, murmur waters, Golden sunbeams smile;' for which she had been promptly rebuked, as it was Sunday. Now he remembered it, and she was carried thither beneath her white pall. The two men stood by as chief mourners, Captain Hawke dry-eyed, Joseph with some display of white pocket-handkerchief. Oddly enough, a speech of Hamlet's at Ophelia's grave came to John, mingled with the ashes to ashes' in Dr. Percival's gentle sleepy tones. When the apple-trees blossomed again, there was a sweet wedding, as the gossips phrased it, in old Tenterden Church. 'I, Joseph, take thee, Serena,' and so on. 'I, Serena, take thee, Joseph,' and so on, to amazement.' Then Mendelssohn's Wedding March,' kisses and congratulations, and bride and bridegroom treading on typical flowers, violets and hyacinths and wood anemones, which the school-children strewed from white baskets. The bride smiled beneath her veil, but Joseph's eye caught the whiteness of a marble cross in a shady nook-' Chloe Tenterden, aged 17,' was the legend on it. At its foot, on the mound above her unheaving breast, was a mass of apple-blossom like a morning cloud. Some one had lately gathered the flowers from her favourite tree. Thank heaven! one could say her, though she had been dead nearly a year. The bridegroom felt a chill of sadness. Poor child!' sighed he. Yes, poor child!' echoed the bride; but she did not feel her somewhat selfish gladness dimmed, for all that. They were both somewhat narrow; but why blame them, any more than one could blame a fern for having no flower? She would have been otherwise, the girl who had mastered love's alphabet before she died. And her teacher? Is it strange that a few weeks should have changed his life, that the best joy of it should have been concentrated into an essence, and enclosed in the crystal of memory? So he was glad when the Messenger came for him also not long after. It was on the route to Coomassie one evening, when the campfires were lighted and the fire-flies flitted in and out of the bush, while overhead a great sunset of crimson and gold was rapidly dying into purple and black. He had been fighting as a Volunteer, and had been wounded that afternoon. Can we do anything for you?' asked his comrades sadly, for they had begun to love him for his gentleness and his bravery. 'Bury this with me,' and he touched a small morocco case. Is she living?' asked one, wondering that he sent no message, and guessing that there was a woman's likeness in it. 'Yes,' said he, with the joy of death in his eyes and flowing like moonlight over his face. Yes, we begin life anew--my girl and I.' 6 They felt the pathos of eternity-nay, rather of life yearning for eternity. When they were carrying him to his grave in the dim dawn before the sunrise, the case fell open,-and by torchlight they saw the face within, and marvelled at the gay look in the blue eyes and the brightness on the rippling curls, but the girl had had more of heaven about her before she died. One would like to know how life goes on with them on the other side of the impenetrable wall. The gay petulance of Chloe was passing into such a large tenderness, that she would have been very sweet as wife and mother. I suspect the man had reached his maximum when death mowed him down before his autumn. Would it be wrong to believe that, in the Paradise where all is perfect, they found some better state, higher, yet corresponding to marriage-that heaven is not an ethereal convent or even a Shaker community, where the glorified men and women live on opposite sides of the building? Some of us would cast a longing eye to earth if it were so. The Haunting Hand. HE deemed her false to him. His furious thought, Rich hours for them-their trysting place of old; She clung Alone and ever in his prayerful cell He heard that wind among those reeds, and felt Clutch at his heart that pleading, drowning hand. |