Once, startled by the expression of the faces around her, Daisy said: 

“Why do you all look so sorry?  Am I very sick?  Am I going to die?  Oh, am I going to die?  I cannot die.  I cannot!  Don’t let me die!  Don’t; don’t.”

It was like the cry of a frightened child begging a reprieve from punishment, and that piteous “Don’t! don’t!” rang in Bessie’s ears long after the lips which uttered the words were silent in death.

During their journeyings together, Daisy had shown the best there was in her and had really seemed trying to reform.  When, on her return from America, she had suggested that they go abroad, saying she would sell her diamonds to defray the expenses, Bessie had refused at first, and had only consented on condition that her mother abandoned all her old habits of life, and neither played nor bet, nor practiced any of her wiles upon the opposite sex for the purpose of extorting money from them.  And all this Daisy promised.

“I’ll be as circumspect as a Methodist parson’s wife,” she said; and she kept her word as well as it was possible for her to do.

She neither played, nor bet, nor coaxed money from her acquaintances by pretty tales of poverty, and if she sometimes bandied familiar jests with her gentlemen friends, Bessie did not know it, and there was springing up in her heart a strong feeling of respect for her mother who, just as the new life was beginning, was to be taken from her.

“Oh, mamma,” she sobbed, putting her poor, pale, face close to that of the dying woman, for Neil had taken her in his arms and laid her beside her mother “oh, mamma, how can I give you up.”  Then, as the greater fear for her mother’s future overmastered every other feeling, she said:  “Speak to me, mother; tell me you are not afraid; tell me you are sorry; tell me, oh, my Heavenly Father, if mother must die, forgive her all the past and take her to Thyself.”

“Yes,” Daisy murmured, moving a little uneasily, “Forgive me all the past—­and there is so much to forgive.  I am sorry, and most of all for Archie and Bessie, whom I neglected so long.  Oh, how pleasant the old home at Stoneleigh looks to me now.  Bury me by Archie in the grass, it is so quiet there; and now it is getting late.  I think I will retire.  Good-night!”

And then, folding her hands together, she said the “Now I lay me,” and Flossie, who was bending over her, knew that she was dead, and motioning to Neil, bade him take Bessie away.

Neil was very tender and very kind and loving to the poor little girl quivering with pain, but uttering no sound and shedding no tear as she lay passive in his arms, but he felt that he was badly abused, and that the burden laid upon him was heavier than he could bear.  Could he have had his way, Daisy would have been buried in the Protestant cemetery, in Rome.  This would have been far less expensive and have saved him no end of trouble.  But when