Where were the traces of her early cares, her sufferings, and fatigues?  All gone.  Sorrow was dead indeed in her, but peace and perfect happiness were born—­imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose.

And still her former self lay there, unaltered in this change.  Yes.  The old fireside had smiled upon that same sweet face; it had passed, like a dream, through haunts of misery and care; at the door of the poor schoolmaster on the summer evening, before the furnace fire upon the cold wet night, there had been the same mild lovely look.  So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death.

The old man had the small hand tight folded to his breast for warmth.  It was the hand she had stretched out to him with her last smile—­the hand that had led him on through all their wanderings.  Ever and anon he pressed it to his lips; then hugged it to his breast again, murmuring that it was warmer now; and as he said it, he looked in agony to those who stood around, as if imploring them to help her.

She was dead, and past all help, or need of it The ancient rooms she had seemed to fill with life, even while her own was waning fast—­the garden she had tended—­the eyes she had gladdened—­the paths she had trodden, as it were, but yesterday—­could know her never more.

She had been dead two days.  She died soon after daybreak.  They had read and talked to her in the earlier portion of the night, but as the hours crept on she sunk to sleep.  They could tell, by what she faintly uttered in her dreams, that they were of her journeyings with the old man; they were of no painful scenes but of people who had helped and used them kindly, for she often said, “God bless you!” with great fervor.  Waking, she never wandered in her mind but once, and that was of beautiful music which she said was in the air.  God knows.  It may have been.

Opening her eyes at last, from a very quiet sleep, she begged that they would kiss her once again.  That done, she turned to the old man with a lovely smile upon her face—­such, they said, as they had never seen, and never could forget—­and clung with both arms about his neck.  They did not know that she was dead, at first.

She would like to see poor Kit, she had often said of late.  She wished there was somebody to take her love to Kit.  And even then, she never thought or spoke about him but with something of her old clear merry laugh.

For the rest, she had never murmured or complained, but with a quiet mind, and manner quite unaltered—­save that she every day became more earnest and more grateful to them—­faded like the light upon a summer’s evening.

They carried her to an old nook, where she had many and many a time sat musing, and laid their burden softly on the pavement.  The light streamed on it through the colored window—­a window where the boughs of trees were ever rustling in the summer, and where the birds sang sweetly all day long.  With every breath of air that stirred among those branches in the sunshine, some trembling changing light would fall upon her grave.