“I am going upstairs”---- Her voice failed.
“She spoke of you: they were almost her last words. You will come with me, friend?”
Harold was a man who never wept--never could weep--but his face grew pale, and there came over him a great awe. His step faltered, even more than her own, as he followed Olive up-stairs.
Her hand trembled a moment on the latch of the door. “No,” she said, as if to herself,--“no, it is not my mother; my mother is not here!”
Then she went in composedly, and uncovered the face of the dead; Harold standing beside her.
Olive was the first to speak. “See,” she whispered, “how very placid and beautiful it looks!--like her and yet unlike. I never for a moment feel that it is _my mother_.”
Harold regarded with amazement the daughter newly orphaned, who stood serenely beholding her dead. He took Olive's hand, softly and with reverence, as if there were something sacred in her touch. _His_ she scarcely seemed to feel, but continued, speaking in the same tranquil voice:
“Two hours ago we were so happy, she and I, talking together of holy things, and of the love we had borne each other. And can such love end with death? Can I believe that one moment--the fleeting of a breath--has left of _my mother_ only this?”
She turned from the bed, and met Harold's eye--intense, athirst--as if his soul's life were in her words.
“You are calm--very calm,” he murmured. “You stand here, and have no fear of death.”
“No; for I have seen my mother die. Her last breath was on my mouth. I _felt_ her spirit pass, and I knew that it was passing unto God.”
“Yes; since for all I lose on earth, heaven--the place of souls, which we call heaven, whatever or wherever that may be--grows nearer to me. It will seem the more my home, now I have a mother there.”
Harold Gwynne fell on his knees at the bedside, crying out:
It was again the season of late summer; and Time's soothing shadow had risen up between the daughter and her grief. The grave in the beautiful churchyard of Har-bury was bright with many months' growth of grass and flowers. It never looked dreary--nay, often seemed almost to smile. It was watered by no tears--it never had been. Those which Olive shed were only for her own loneliness, and at times she felt that even these were wrong. Many people, seeing how calm she was, and how, after a season, she fell into her old pursuits and her kindly duties to all around, used to say, “Who would have thought that Miss Rothesay would have forgotten her mother so easily?”