"I didn't need Mary's. But this is all I've ever seen of my little girl. To-morrow, at daybreak,--it will be just at daybreak,--when you see that I've passed, I want you to lay this here on my breast. Then fold my hands upon it"-- His speech was arrested. He seemed to hearken an instant. "Doctor," he said, with excitement in his eye and sudden strength of voice, "what is that I hear?" "I don't know," replied his friend; "one of the servants probably down in the hall." But he, too, seemed to have been startled. He lifted his head. There was a sound of some one coming up the stairs in haste. "Doctor." The Doctor was rising from his chair. "Lie still, Richling." But the sick man suddenly sat erect. "Doctor--it's--O Doctor, I"-- The door flew open; there was a low outcry from the threshold, a moan of joy from the sick man, a throwing wide of arms, and a rush to the bedside, and John and Mary Richling--and the little Alice, too-- Come, Doctor Sevier; come out and close the door. * * * "Strangest thing on earth!" I once heard a physician say,--"the mysterious power that the dying so often have to fix the very hour of their approaching end!" It was so in John Richling's case. It was as he said. Had Mary and Alice not come when they did, they would have been too late. He "tarried but a night;" and at the dawn Mary uttered the bitter cry of the widow, and Doctor Sevier closed the eyes of the one who had committed no fault,--against this world, at least,--save that he had been by nature a pilgrim and a stranger in it. CHAPTER LIX. AFTERGLOW. Mary, with Alice holding one hand, flowers in the other, was walking one day down the central avenue of the old Girod Cemetery, breaking the silence of the place only by the soft grinding of her footsteps on the shell-walk, and was just entering a transverse alley, when she stopped. Just at hand a large, broad woman, very plainly dressed, was drawing back a single step from the front of a tomb, and dropping her hands from a coarse vase of flowers that she had that moment placed on the narrow stone shelf under the tablet. The blossoms touched, without hiding, the newly cut name. She had hung a little plaster crucifix against it from above. She must have heard the footfall so near by, and marked its stoppage; but, with the oblivion common to the practisers of her religion, she took no outward notice. She crossed herself, sank upon her knees, and with her eyes upon the shrine she had made remained thus. The tears ran down Mary's face. It was Madame Zenobie. They went and lived together.