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“Unless,” I suggested, “you could add that her mother had just told her she would not oppose her marriage any longer, and it was the joy that brought on the access of the trouble that is killing her.”

“Did the doctor say that?” Mrs. March demanded, severely.

“No. And I haven’t the least notion that anything like it happened. But if it had–“

“It would have been too tawdry. I’m ashamed of you for thinking of such a thing, Basil.”

Upon reflection, I was rather ashamed myself; but I plucked up courage to venture: “It would be rather fine, wouldn’t it, when that poor girl is gone, if Mrs. Bentley had Glendenning come and live with her, and they devoted themselves to each other for her daughter’s sake?”

“Fine! It would be ghastly. What are you thinking of, my dear? How would it be fine?”

“Oh, I mean dramatically,” I apologized, and, not to make bad worse, I said no more.

The next day, which was Sunday, a telegram came for me, which I decided, without opening it, to be the announcement of the end. But it proved to be a message from Mrs. Bentley, begging in most urgent terms that Mrs. March and I would come to her at once, if possible. These terms left the widest latitude for surmise, but none for choice, in the sad circumstances, and we looked up the Sunday trains for Gormanville, and went.

We found the poor woman piteously grateful, but by no means so prostrated as we had expected. She was rather, as often happens, stayed and held upright by the burden that had been laid upon her, and it was with fortitude if not dignity that she appealed to us for our counsel, and if possible our help, in a matter about which she had already consulted the doctor. “The doctor says that the excitement cannot hurt Edith; it may even help her, to propose it. I should like to do it, but if you do not think well of it, I will not do it. I know it is too late now to make up to her for the past,” said Mrs. Bentley, and here she gave way to the grief she had restrained hitherto.

“There is no one else,” she went on, “who has been so intimately acquainted with the facts of my daughter’s engagement–no one else that I can confide in or appeal to.”

We both murmured that she was very good; but she put our politeness somewhat peremptorily aside.

“It is the only thing I can do now, and it is useless to do that now. It will be no reparation for the past, and it will be for myself and not for her, as all that I have done in the past has been; but I wish to know what you think of their getting married now.”

I am afraid that if we had said what we thought of such a tardy and futile proof of penitence we should have brought little comfort to the mother’s heart, but we looked at each other in the disgust we both felt and said there would be a sacred fitness in it.

She was apparently much consoled.

It was touching enough, and I at least was affected by her tears; I am not so sure my wife was. But she had instantly to consider how best to propose the matter to Miss Bentley, and to act upon her decision.

After all, as she reported the fact to me later, it was very simple to suggest her mother’s wish to the girl, who listened to it with a perfect intelligence in which there was no bitterness.

“They think I am going to die,” she said, quietly, “and I can understand how she feels. It seems such a mockery; but if she wishes it; and Arthur–“

It was my part to deal with Glendenning, and I did not find it so easy.

“Marriage is for life and for earth,” he said, solemnly, and I thought very truly. “In the resurrection we shall be one another’s without it. I don’t like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems like a profanation of its mystery.”