"Going away? And you to say so, too! I will never leave this place until I die!" "You love him, then, thank God!" "Love him! Shall I tell you how? You know best what it was to love him, for you loved him best,--better than I did; and yet I loved him with all love. Do I look older, and more like this world, or less?" She smiled a sweet significance,--a smile she had learned from him. "I have been thinking how young you look,--too young, almost. You are so fresh, so child-like, and--may I say it?--so fair." "You may say anything. I think I have grown fairer myself. Very strange to confess, is it? But you are my friend,--to you I should confess anything. I have been with a spirit-angel,--no wonder I am fresh. I have been in heaven,--no wonder I am fair. I felt myself grow better hour by hour. After I left you with him, when his arms were round me, when he kissed me, when his tenderness oppressed me,--I felt raised to God. No heart ever was so pure, so overflowing with the light of heaven. I can only believe I have been in heaven, and have fallen here,--not that he has left me, and I must follow him to find him. I will not follow yet, my friend! I have much to do that he has left me." "Thank God, you will not leave us,--but more, because you love him, and made him happy!" "You do not, perhaps, know that he was never anything but happy. When I think of discontent and envy and hatred and anger and care, and see them painted upon other faces, I feel that he must have tasted heaven to have made himself so happy here. I can fancy a single taste of heaven, sir, lasting a whole life long." She was his taste of heaven, as a foretaste even to me! But had she, indeed, never learned the secret of his memory, or had she turned, indeed, its darkness into light? "I wish to hear about the last." "You know nearly as much as I do, or as I can tell you. You remember the music you heard last night? It was the last he wrote, and I found it and saved it, and had done with it what you heard." But I cannot descant on death-beds; it is the only theme which I dare believe, if I were to touch, would scare me at my dying hour. I will not tamper with those scenes, but console myself by reminding that if the time had been, and that, too, lately, when upon that brain fell the light in fever and the sun in fire, the time was over; and sightless, painless, deaf to the farewells of dying music, he, indeed, could not be said to _suffer_ death. Nor did he _know_ to suffer it, as he had said. The crown that, piercing with its _fiery thorns_ unfelt, had pressed into his brow the death-sting, should also crown with its _star-flowers_ the waking unto life. * * * * * "You remember what you said, Mr. Auchester, that he needed a 'companion for his earthly hours:' I tried to be his companion,--he allowed me to be so; and one of the last times he spoke he said: 'Thank Carl for giving you to me.'"