“It would have been pleasant, and for a minute I was tempted to take her at her word,” he said; “but when I remembered my hair and face and hands, and how she liked nothing which was not comely, I would not run the chance of being hated for my repulsive looks.  Poor little Daisy! she meant it all right, and I bless her for it, and am glad she said it, but she must not look at me when I’m dead.  The freckles she dislikes so much will show plainer then.  Don’t let her come near, or, if she must, cover me up—­cover me up—­cover me from her sight.”

Thus he talked, and Daisy, who knew what he meant, wept silently by his side, and kept the sheet closely drawn over the hands he was so anxious to have hidden from her view.  He knew her at last, and bade her a long farewell, and told her she had been to him the dearest thing in life, and Daisy’s arm was round him, supporting him upon the pillow, and Daisy’s hand wiped the death moisture from his brow, and Daisy’s lips were pressed to his dying face, and her ear caught his last faint whisper: 

“God bless you, darling!  I am going home!  Good-by!”

“The man in the corner—­that other one”—­had claimed him, and Daisy put gently from her only the lifeless form which had once been Tom.

They buried him there in France on a sunny slope, where the grass was green and the flowers blossomed in the early spring, and when Mr. McDonald examined his papers he found to his surprise that, with the exception of an annuity to himself and several legacies to different charitable institutions, Tom had left to Daisy his entire fortune, stipulating only that one-tenth of all her income should be yearly given back to God, who had a right to it.

CHAPTER X

MISS MCDONALD

She took that name again, and with it, also, Margaret, feeling that Daisy was far too girlish an appellation for one who clad herself almost in widow’s weeds, and felt, when she stood at poor Tom’s grave, more wretched and desolate than many a wife has felt when her husband was put from her sight.

Tom had meant to make her parents independent of her so that she need not have them with her unless she chose to do so, for, knowing Mr. McDonald as he did, he thought she would be happier alone, but God so ordered it that within three months after poor Tom’s death they made another grave beside his, and Daisy and her mother were alone.

It was spring-time now, and the two desolate women bade adieu to their dead, and made their way to England, and from there to Scotland, where among the heather hills they passed the summer in the utmost seclusion.

Here Daisy had ample time for thought, which dwelt mostly upon the past and the happiness she cast away when she consented to the sundering of the tie which had bound her to Guy Thornton.

“Oh, how could I have been so foolish and so weak,” she said, as, with intense contempt for herself, she read over the journal she had kept at Elmwood during the first weeks of her married life.