She had written a little letter to Clarence, begging his forgiveness for having cut him, and treated him with the scorn which, I believe, was the chief fault that weighed upon her conscience; and, hearing my father’s voice in the house, she sent a message to beg him to come and see her in her mother’s dressing-room—that very window where I had first heard her voice, refusing to come down to ‘those Winslows.’ She had sent for him to entreat him to forgive Griffith and recall the pair to Chantry House. ‘Not now,’ she said, ‘but when I am gone.’ My father could deny her nothing, though he showed that the sight of her made the entreaty all the harder to him; and she pleaded, ‘But you know this was not his doing. I never was strong, and it had begun before. Only think how sad it would have been for him.’ My father would have promised anything with that wasted hand on his, those fervent eyes gazing on him, and he told her he would have given his pardon long ago, if it had been sought, as it never had been. ‘Ah! perhaps he did not dare!’ she said. ‘Won’t you write when all this is over, and then you will be one family again as you used to be?’ He promised, though he scarcely knew where Griffith was. Clarence, however, did. He had answered Ellen’s letter, and it had made him ask for a few days’ leave of absence. So he came down on the Saturday, and was allowed a quarter of an hour beside Ellen’s sofa in the Sunday evening twilight. He brought away the calm, rapt expression I had sometimes seen on his face at church, and Ellen made a special entreaty that he might share the morrow’s feast. There are some things that cannot be written of, and that was one. Still we had not thought the end near at hand, though on Tuesday morning a message was sent that Ellen was suffering and exhausted, and could not see Emily. It was a wild, stormy day, with fierce showers of sleet, and we clung to the hope that consideration for my sister had prompted the message. In the afternoon Clarence battled with a severe gale, made his way to Hillside, and heard that the weather affected the patient, and that there was much bodily distress. For one moment he saw her father, who said in broken accents that we could only pray that the spirit might be freed without much more suffering, ‘though no doubt it is all right.’ Before daylight, before any one in the house was up, Clarence was mounting the hill in the gusts that had done their work on the trees and were subsiding with the darkness. And just as he was beginning the descent, as the sun tipped the Hillside steeple with light, he heard the knell, and counted the twenty-one for the years of our Ellen—for ours she will always be. ‘Somehow,’ he told me, ‘I could not help taking off my hat and giving thanks for her, and then all the drops on all the boughs began sparkling, and there was a hush on all around as if she were passing among the angels, and a thrush broke out into a regular song of jubilee!’