It was on the evening of the second day that she fell ill; and Mabel, running upstairs, in alarm at the message of the servant, found her rather flushed and agitated in her chair.

“It is nothing, my dear,” said the old lady tremulously; and she added the description of a symptom or two.

Mabel got her to bed, sent for the doctor, and sat down to wait.

She was sincerely fond of the old lady, and had always found her presence in the house a quiet sort of delight.  The effect of her upon the mind was as that of an easy-chair upon the body.  The old lady was so tranquil and human, so absorbed in small external matters, so reminiscent now and then of the days of her youth, so utterly without resentment or peevishness.  It seemed curiously pathetic to the girl to watch that quiet old spirit approach its extinction, or rather, as Mabel believed, its loss of personality in the reabsorption into the Spirit of Life which informed the world.  She found less difficulty in contemplating the end of a vigorous soul, for in that case she imagined a kind of energetic rush of force back into the origin of things; but in this peaceful old lady there was so little energy; her whole point, so to speak, lay in the delicate little fabric of personality, built out of fragile things into an entity far more significant than the sum of its component parts:  the death of a flower, reflected Mabel, is sadder than the death of a lion; the breaking of a piece of china more irreparable than the ruin of a palace.

“It is syncope,” said the doctor when he came in.  “She may die at any time; she may live ten years.”

“There is no need to telegraph for Mr. Brand?”

He made a little deprecating movement with his hands.

“It is not certain that she will die—­it is not imminent?” she asked.

“No, no; she may live ten years, I said.”

He added a word or two of advice as to the use of the oxygen injector, and went away.

* * * * *

The old lady was lying quietly in bed, when the girl went up, and put out a wrinkled hand.

“Well, my dear?” she asked.

“It is just a little weakness, mother.  You must lie quiet and do nothing.  Shall I read to you?”

“No, my dear; I will think a little.”

It was no part of Mabel’s idea to duty to tell her that she was in danger, for there was no past to set straight, no Judge to be confronted.  Death was an ending, not a beginning.  It was a peaceful Gospel; at least, it became peaceful as soon as the end had come.

So the girl went downstairs once more, with a quiet little ache at her heart that refused to be still.

What a strange and beautiful thing death was, she told herself—­this resolution of a chord that had hung suspended for thirty, fifty or seventy years—­back again into the stillness of the huge Instrument that was all in all to itself.  Those same notes would be struck again, were being struck again even now all over the world, though with an infinite delicacy of difference in the touch; but that particular emotion was gone:  it was foolish to think that it was sounding eternally elsewhere, for there was no elsewhere.  She, too, herself would cease one day, let her see to it that the tone was pure and lovely.