“Yes,” Miss Harvey answered simply.  She stopped before a compartment door, opened it softly, and, stepping aside, motioned Helena to enter.

A little cry rose to Helena’s lips that she choked back somehow, and a mist for a moment blinded her eyes—­then she was kneeling beside the brass bed, and was holding in both her own the hand that was stretched out to her.

“Helena—­dear—­I am so glad you came,” said Mrs. Thornton faintly.  “I—­I am not going to get better, and there are some things I want to say to you.”

“Oh, but you are,” returned Helena quickly, smiling bravely now.  “You mustn’t say that.”

Mrs. Thornton shook her head.

“Dear,” she said, “I know.  And I know that what I have to say I must say quickly.”  Her voice seemed to grow suddenly stronger with a great earnestness.  “Listen, dear.  This must not make any difference to this wonderful work that has just begun here.  I was cured of my hip disease—­perfectly cured—­no one can deny that—­this is my own fault, I have overdone it—­I would not listen to reason—­to do what I have done in the last few days, when for a year and a half I had never moved a step, was more than my heart could stand.  I should have been more quiet—­but I was so glad, so happy—­and I wanted to tell everybody—­I wanted all the world to know, so that others could find the joy that I had found.”

She paused—­and Helena sought for words that, somehow, would not come.

The nurse was bending over the bed on the other side, and Mrs. Thornton turned her head toward Miss Harvey now.  She smiled gently, as though to rob her words of any possible hurt.

“Nurse, I want—­to be alone with Miss Vail for just a moment.”

Miss Harvey, doubtful, hesitated.

“Only for a moment,” pleaded Mrs. Thornton.  “You can stay just outside the door.”

Reluctantly, Miss Harvey complied, and left the room.

Mrs. Thornton pressed Helena’s hand tightly.

“Listen, dear—­this must not make any difference.  It—­it is the one thing that will make me happy now—­to know that.  I—­I have written a little note to Robert about it, to be given to him.  Oh, if I could only have lived to help—­I should have tried so hard to be worthy to have a part in it.  Not like you, dear, with your sweetness and nobleness, for God seems to have singled you out for this—­but just to have had a little part.  How wonderful it would have been, bringing peace and health and gladness where only sorrow and misery was before, and—­and—­”

Mrs. Thornton’s eyes closed, and she lay for a moment quiet.

A blackness seemed to settle upon Helena—­and how cold it was!  She shivered.  Her dark eyes, wide, tearless now, stared, startled, dazed, at the white face on the pillow crowned with its mass of golden hair.  Her sweetness!  Her nobleness!  Helena’s lips half parted and her breath came in quick, fierce, little gasps—­it seemed as though she had been struck a blow that she could not quite understand because somehow it had numbed her senses—­only there was a hurt that curiously, strangely seemed to mock as it stabbed with pain.