“I should like to speak to him, Ducie.  Tell him that Charlotte Sandal wants his blessing.”

He was lying on the big oak bed in the best room, waiting for his dismissal in cheerful serenity.  “Come here, Charlotte,” he said; “stoop down, and let me see you once more.  My sight grows dim.  I am going away, dear.”

“O grandfather! is there any thing I can do for you?”

“Be a good girl.  Be good, and do good.  Stand true to Steve,—­remember,—­true to Steve.”  And he did not seem inclined to talk more.

“He is saving his strength for the squire,” said Ducie.  “He has a deal to say to him.”

“Father hoped to be back this afternoon.”

“Though it be the darkening when he gets home, ask him to come at once, Charlotte.  Father is waiting for him, and I don’t think he will pass the turn of the night.”

There were many subtle links of sympathy between Up-Hill and Sandal.  Death could not be in one house without casting a shadow in the other.  Julius privately thought such a fellow-feeling a little stretched.  The Latriggs were on a distinctly lower social footing than the Sandals.  Rich they might be; but they were not written among the list of county families, nor had they even married into their ranks.  He could not understand why Barf Latrigg’s death should be allowed to interfere with life at Seat-Sandal.  Yet Mrs. Sandal was at Up-Hill all the afternoon; and, though the squire did not get home until quite the darkening, he went at once, without taking food or rest, to the dying man.

“Why, Barf is very near all the same as my own father,” he said.  And then, in a lower voice, “and he may see my father before the strike of day.  I wouldn’t miss Barfs last words for a year of life.  I wouldn’t that.”

It was a lovely night,—­warm, and sweet with the scent of August lilies, and the rich aromas of ripening fruit and grain.  The great hills and the peaceful valleys lay under the soft radiance of a full moon; and there was not a sound but the gurgle of running water, or the bark of some solitary sheep-dog, watching the folds on the high fells.  Sophia and Julius were walking in the garden, both feeling the sensitive suggestiveness of the hour, talking softly together on topics people seldom discuss in the sunshine,—­intimations of lost powers, prior existences, immortal life.  Julius was learned in the Oriental view of metempsychosis.  Sophia could trace the veiled intuition through the highest inspiration of Western thought.

“It whispers in the heart of every shepherd on these hills,” she said; “and they interpreted for Mr. Wordsworth the dream of his own soul.”

“I know, Sophia.  I lifted the book yesterday:  your mark was in it.”  And he recited in a low, intense voice,—­

“’Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar: 
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:’”