After they were gone, she lay a long time quiet, with her hand over her eyes.  Forgive her! she, too, was a woman.  Ah, it may be there are more wrongs that shall be righted yonder in the To-Morrow than are set down in your theology!

And so it was, that, as she drew nearer to this To-Morrow, the brain of the girl grew clearer,—­struggling, one would think, to shake off whatever weight had been put on it by blood or vice or poverty, and become itself again.  Perhaps, even in her cheerful, patient life, there had been hours when she had known the wrongs that had been done her, known how cruelly the world had thwarted her; her very keen insight into whatever was beautiful or helpful may have made her see her own mischance, the blank she had drawn in life, more bitterly.  She did not see it bitterly now.  Death is honest; all things grew clear to her, going down into the valley of the shadow; so, wakening to the consciousness of stifled powers and ungiven happiness, she saw that the fault was not hers, nor His who had appointed her lot; He had helped her to bear it,—­bearing worse himself.  She did not say once, “I might have been,” but day by day, more surely, “I shall be.”  There was not a tear in the homely faces turning from her bed, not a tint of color in the flowers they brought her, not a shiver of light in the ashy sky, that did not make her more sure of that which was to come.  More loving she grew, as she went away from them, the touch of her hand more pitiful, her voice more tender, if such a thing could be,—­with a look in her eyes never seen there before.  Old Yare pointed it out to Mrs. Polston one day.

“My girl’s far off frum us,” he said, sobbing in the kitchen,—­“my girl’s far off now.”

It was the last night of the year that she died.  She was so much better that they all were quite cheerful.  Kitts went away as it grew dark, and she bade him wrap up his throat with such a motherly dogmatism that they all laughed at her; she, too, with the rest.

“I’ll make you a New-Year’s call,” he said, going out; and she called out that she should be sure to expect him.

She seemed so strong that Holmes and Mrs. Polston and Margaret, who were there, were going home; besides, old Yare said, “I’d like to take care o’ my girl alone to-night, ef yoh’d let me,”—­for they had not trusted him before.  But Lois asked them not to go until the Old Year was over; so they waited downstairs.

The old man fell asleep, and it was near midnight when he wakened with a cold touch on his hand.

“It’s come, father!”

He started up with a cry, looking at the new smile in her eyes, grown strangely still.

“Call them all, quick, father!”

Whatever was the mystery of death that met her now, her heart clung to the old love that had been true to her so long.

He did not move.

“Let me hev yoh to myself, Lo, ‘t th’ last; yoh’re all I hev; let me hev yoh ‘t th’ last.”