Then she beckoned to the old preacher, who knelt by her side, and he put his arms around her neck and raised her on the pillow. And his ear was close to her lips, for she could scarcely talk, and Alice Westmore knelt and listened, too. She listened, but with a griping, strained heartache,--listened to a dying confession from the pale lips, and the truth for the first time came to Alice Westmore, and kneeling, she could not rise, but bent again her head and heard the pitiful, dying confession. As she listened to the broken, gasping words, heard the heart-breaking secret come out of the ruins of its wrecked home, her love, her temptation, her ignorance in wondering if she were really married by the laws of love, and then the great martyrdom of it all--giving her life, her all, that the others might live--a terrible tightening gathered around Alice Westmore's heart, her head fell with the flooding tears and she knelt sobbing, her bloodless fingers clutching the bed of the dying girl. "Don't cry," said Maggie. "I should be the one to weep, ... only I am so happy ... to think ... I am loved by the noblest, best, of men, ... an' I love him so, ... only he ain't here; ... but I wouldn't have him see me die. Now--now ... what I want to know, Bishop, ..." she tried to rise. She seemed to be passing away. The old man caught her and held her in his arms. Her eyes opened: "I--is--" she went on, in the agony of it all with the same breath, "am ... am I married ... in God's sight ... as well as his--" The old man held her tenderly as if she were a child. He smiled calmly, sweetly, into her eyes as he said: "You believed it an' you loved only him, Maggie--poor chile!" "Oh, yes--yes--" she smiled, "an' now--even now I love him up--right up--as you see ... to the door, ... to the shadow, ... to the valley of the shadow...." "And it went for these, for these"--he said looking around at the room. "For them--my little ones--they had no mother, you kno'--an' Daddy's back. Oh, I didn't mind the work, ... the mill that has killed ... killed me, ... but, ... but was I"--her voice rose to a shrill cry of agony--"am I married in God's sight?" Alice quivered in the beauty of the answer which came back from the old man's lips: "As sure as God lives, you were--there now--sleep and rest; it is all right, child." Then a sweet calmness settled over her face, and with it a smile of exquisite happiness. She fell back on her pillow: "In God's sight ... married ... married ... my--Oh, I have never said it before ... but now, ... can't I?" The Bishop nodded, smiling. "My husband, ... my husband, ... dear heart, ... Good-bye...." She tried to reach under her pillow to draw out something, and then she smiled and died.