“It looks like a hundred years to me,” she said, “and before I can look back as you do it will be a hundred years more. And how am I to bear them all without a break or a rest? If I were even like you, a soldier marching here and there, with your colors flying and your drums beating! but what has a woman to do but to sit and think and count the days? Uncle Robert,” she said, putting her hand on his arm as he stood near her, with his back to the fire, “I’m not unwilling at all to die. I would never have minded if it had been so. I would have asked for nothing but a warm green turf from the moor, and maybe a bush of heather at my feet. But it has not ended like that, which would have been God’s doing--only I will never get well unless I get away, unless I breathe other air; and if you refuse me, that will be your doing!” she cried with something of her old petulance and fire. “Did the doctor say any thing about this change?” Sir Robert asked Beenie, with a cloud upon his face. “He said she was to be crossed in naething,” Beenie replied. CHAPTER XXXVIII When it was settled that Lily was to have the change upon which she insisted, her health improved day by day, and with the increase of her strength, or perhaps as the real fountain-head and cause of her increased strength, her elasticity of spirit returned to her. By one of those strange gifts of temperament which triumph over every thing that humanity can encounter, this young creature, overwhelmed by so many griefs--a deserted wife, a mother whose child had been torn from her, her secret life so full of incidents and emotion ending all at once in a blank--became in the added grace of her weakness and of the spirit and courage which overcame it as sweet a companion to her old uncle, as full of variety and freshness, as the heart could desire. He, indeed, had never known such company before. She had been younger by an age when she left him in Edinburgh, less developed, half a child, at least in his eyes, and he had been surrounded by company and cronies of his own of a very different character. But now, in this lonely spot where there was nobody, Lily, rising from her sick-bed, with her eyes still large in their white sockets, her hands still transparent, her touch and her step still tremulous with weakness, became his diversion, his delight, making the long lonely days short, and even the rain supportable when it swept against the narrow windows, and intensified the brightness of the fireside and the pleasant talk, or even, when there was no talk, the sense of companionship within. Sometimes Lily would fall asleep in the afternoon or at the falling of the day, unawares, in the feebleness of her convalescence, and perhaps these were the moments in which most of all the old man of the world felt completely what this companionship was. He would lay down his paper or his book and look at her--the light of the fire playing on her face, giving it a faint touch of rose, and