Helen mingled a few broken thanks and petitions with her tears:  thanks that she had been permitted to share the last days and hours of this poor sister in sorrow; petitions that the grief of bereavement might be lightened to the lonely parent and the faithful old servant.

Old Sophy said almost nothing, but sat day and night by her dead darling.  But sometimes her anguish would find an outlet in strange sounds, something between a cry and a musical note,—­such as none had ever heard her utter before.  These were old remembrances surging up from her childish days,—­coming through her mother from the cannibal chief, her grandfather,—­death-wails, such as they sing in the mountains of Western Africa, when they see the fires on distant hill-sides and know that their own wives and children are undergoing the fate of captives.

The time came when Elsie was to be laid by her mother in the small square marked by the white stone.

It was not unwillingly that the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had relinquished the duty of conducting the service to the Reverend Doctor Honeywood, in accordance with Elsie’s request.  He could not, by any reasoning, reconcile his present way of thinking with a hope for the future of his unfortunate parishioner.  Any good old Roman Catholic priest, born and bred to his faith and his business, would have found a loop-hole into some kind of heaven for her, by virtue of his doctrine of “invincible ignorance,” or other special proviso; but a recent convert cannot enter into the working conditions of his new creed.  Beliefs must be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the soul’s wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable.

The Reverend Doctor had no such scruples.  Like thousands of those who are classed nominally with the despairing believers, he had never prayed over a departed brother or sister without feeling and expressing a guarded hope that there was mercy in store for the poor sinner, whom parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters could not bear to give up to utter ruin without a word,—­and would not, as he knew full well, in virtue of that human love and sympathy which nothing can ever extinguish.  And in this poor Elsie’s history he could read nothing which the tears of the recording angel might not wash away.  As the good physician of the place knew the diseases that assailed the bodies of men and women, so he had learned the mysteries of the sickness of the soul.

So many wished to look upon Elsie’s face once more, that her father would not deny them; nay, he was pleased that those who remembered her living should see her in the still beauty of death.  Helen and those with her arrayed her for this farewell-view.  All was ready for the sad or curious eyes which were to look upon her.  There was no painful change to be concealed by any artifice.  Even her round neck was left uncovered, that she might be more like one who slept.  Only the golden cord was left in its place:  some searching eye might detect a trace of that birth-mark which it was whispered she had always worn a necklace to conceal.