“Better read it now.  No time like the present,” observed Miss Maclachlan.

Miss Williams did so.  As soon as she was fairly started and alone in the fly, she opened it, with hands slightly trembling, for she was touched by the persistence of the good rector, and his faithfulness to her, a poor governess, when he might have married, as they said in his neighborhood, “anybody.”  He would never marry any body now—­he was dying.

“I have come to feel how wrong I was,” he wrote, “in ever trying to change our happy relations together.  I have suffered for this—­so have we all.  But it is now too late for regret.  My time has come.  Do not grieve yourself by imagining it has come the faster through any decision of yours, but by slow, inevitable disease, which the doctors have only lately discovered.  Nothing could have saved me.  Be satisfied that there is no cause for you to give yourself one moment’s pain.” (How she sobbed over those shaky lines, more even than over the newspaper lines which she had read that sun-shiny morning on the shore!) “Remember only that you made me very happy—­me and all mine—­for years; that I loved you, as even at my age a man can love; as I shall love you to the end, which can not be very far off now.  Would you dislike coming to see me just once again?  My girls will so very glad, and nobody knows any thing.  Besides, what matter?  I am dying.  Come, if you can within a week or so; they tell me I may last thus long.  And I want to consult with you about my children.  Therefore I will not say good-by now, only good-night, and God bless you.”

But it was good-by, after all.  Though she did not wait the week; indeed, she waited for nothing, considered nothing, except her gratitude to this good man—­the only man who had loved her—­and her affection for the two girls, who would soon be fatherless; though she sent a telegram from Brighton to say she was coming, and arrived within twenty-four hours, still—­she came too late.

When she reached the village she heard that his sufferings were all over; and a few yards from his garden wall, in the shade of the church-yard lime-tree, the old sexton was busy re-opening, after fourteen years, the family grave, where he was to be laid beside his wife the day after to-morrow.  His two daughters, sitting alone together in the melancholy house, heard Miss Williams enter, and ran to meet her.  With a feeling of nearness and tenderness such as she had scarcely ever felt for any human being, she clasped them close, and let them weep their hearts out in her motherly arms.