All the sudden hot anger against the husband she had loved--the husband who had wronged her, and left desolate the sweetest years of her life--fades out of her heart. The words falter as hollowly from her lips as from his: "I promise." "Thanks. May God bless you--and--and make all your future years happy ones. Mother--call mother, please." She puts a little cordial to the panting lips and tearfully obeys. On her knees at the other side of the bed the anguished mother listens to the tender message to the absent sister, the soft words of comfort, the low farewell. With the last kiss of her son on her lips she buries her face speechlessly in his pillow. "Gracie, will _you_ raise me a little?" She bends with one arm under his shoulders, the other across his breast, and lifts him so that his head rests comfortably against her shoulder--an easy task, fragile and wearied as she is, for he has wasted in the grasp of that destroying fever until he is scarcely more than a wan shadow of himself. Bending to look into his face, she asks, softly: "Willard, are you easy now?" "Quite _easy_," he answers, in a strangely contented tone, with such a tender caress in it that Grace starts; and as he falters "good-by," she bends with a sudden impulse and just touches her lips to his in a pure thrill of sisterly affection and grief; his glance lifts to hers an instant and remains fixed; a quivering sigh, a scarcely perceptible shudder, and Willard Clendenon's spirit has flown out of the earthly heaven of her arms to the higher heaven of his soul. * * * * * Later, as Grace lay weeping in her own room, the bereaved mother came gliding in. The soft flame of a wax candle lent a faint, pure light to the room, and showed her gentle face, free from tears, but seamed with a touching resignation beautiful in the extreme. What a mournful pathos lies in the grief of an old face! It is more eloquent than tears, even as silence can be more eloquent than speech. Sitting on the edge of Grace's lounge, gently smoothing the disheveled curls with her cool fingers, it would seem as if the younger woman were the mourner, she the comforter. "God knows best," she says, with a Christian's strong reliance; and then she added, pathetically: "And it has come to me suddenly, Gracie, child, that my poor boy was not, perhaps, quite happy, or, at least, that some grief, at which we never guessed, was mingled with the quiet thread of his life." A sudden memory of words of his came into Grace's mind. "God, when He puts a life-long sorrow on our hearts, usually compensates for it by giving us a brief span of life in which to endure it." "He deserved to be happy," she answered, warmly. "He was so good, so true. If any merited perfect content, it was your son." "You have seen him sometimes in the whirl of gay society, Grace; did you ever notice in him any peculiar attachment for a woman?"