Never can I forget her look as we sat together in her cabin one afternoon, she reading from this book and I listening. The subject was Death. As she read her face lighted up. I gazed with wonder, with something of awe and adoration at the tender triumphant enthusiasm of her expression. A delicate flush tinged her cheeks, her bosom rose and fell as though to a sobbing of joy. From time to time she paused with lifted eyes, and her lips murmured inarticulately. ‘It is beautiful and it is true!’ she exclaimed as she closed the book. ‘Why is not death always thus represented? All must suffer. Why should death be called the King of Terrors? The imaginations of men picture sleep as an angel bending over the weary, lulling pain, wreathing sorrowful lips with smiles. But death--the deeper sleep, the angel that is God’s messenger to man--death must be made terrifying and shocking! It is a dreadful spectre poising a lance! Oh, death is divine; it is no terrifying skeleton, but an angel of love, whose gift of slumber is sweet and sure, from whose dreamless sleep you arise to find yourself in the presence of God.’ In this strain would she talk to me, but in words and thoughts more exalted than I have memory for. When I look back and recall these sentences I have just written down, I often think to myself that it was faith and not death that was the holy, soothing, and healing angel she spoke of, and God’s messenger to man; for it was faith that lighted up her eye and painted an expression of rapture upon her face when she looked up to heaven and thought of the grave as but the little gate that was to admit her into the shining glorious highway. And, again, when I think of her, I often say to myself, Who to obtain faith would not exchange all the treasures of this world?--to feel a deeper joy in surrendering all things than many know in the acquisition of a few, to have your hope fixed high like some bright star in the heavens, to desire death rather than to shrink from it, to feel that the deep night of death is on _this_ side the grave, and that the true dawn breaks not until the spirit stands on the other side of that little silent chamber of earth in which the body rests--to know this, to feel this is the sweet sure gift of faith, the angel in whose atmosphere of heavenly light death the shadow perishes. It was on the third or the fourth morning following the day on which we had passed the island of Madeira--that is to say, on which we had crossed the parallel of latitude on which the island of Madeira lies--that, being in my cabin where I had passed ten minutes in gossip with the stewardess, the door was thumped by a fist which I easily recognised as Mr. McEwan’s, and the ship’s doctor entered. ‘Good morning.’ ‘Good morning, Mr. McEwan.’ ‘I am the bearer of a message,’ said he. ‘I have told Miss Lee that she may go on deck this morning, and Mrs. Lee has asked me to request you to accompany her daughter.’