“Take them, they will live almost as long as I shall.”

“Lily, you will get well, and we shall see Italy together.  I had to leave you—­I should have gone mad had I remained.  The moment I heard I could see you I returned.  You will get well.”

“No, no; I’m here only for a few days—­a few weeks at most.  I shall never go to Italy.  I shall never be your sweetheart.  I’m one of God’s virgins.  I belong to my saint, my first and real sweetheart.  You remember when I came to see you in the Temple Gardens, I told you about Him then, didn’t I!  Ah! happy, happy aspirations, better even than you, my darling.  And He is waiting for me; I see Him now.  He smiles, and opens His arms.”

“You’ll get well.  The sun of Italy shall be our heaven, thy lips shall give me immortality, thy love shall give me God.”

“Fine words, my sweetheart, fine words, but death waits not for love....  Well, it’s a pity to die without having loved.”

“It is worse to live without having loved, dearest—­dearest, you will live.”

He never saw her again.  Next day she was too ill to come down, and henceforth she grew daily weaker.  Every day brought death visibly nearer, and one day the Major came to Mike in the garden and said—­

“It is all over, my poor friend!”

Then came days of white flowers and wreaths, and bouquets and baskets of bloom, stephanotis, roses, lilies, and every white blossom that blows; and so friends sought to cover and hide the darkness of the grave.  Mike remembered the disordered faces of the girls in church; weeping, they threw themselves on each other’s shoulders; and the mournful chant was sung; and the procession toiled up the long hill to the cemetery above the town, and Lily was laid there, to rest there for ever.  There she lies, facing Italy, which she never knew but in dream.  The wide country leading to Italy lies below her, the peaks of the rocky coast, the blue sea, the gray-green olives billowing like tides from hill to hill; the white loggias gleaming in the sunlight.  His thoughts followed the flight of the blue mountain passes that lead so enticingly to Italy, and as he looked into the distance, dim and faint as the dream that had gone, there rose in his mind an even fairer land than Italy, the land of dream, where for every one, even for Mike Fletcher, there grows some rose or lily unattainable.

CHAPTER X

In the dreary drawing-room, amid the tattered copies of the Graphic and Illustrated London News, he encountered the inevitable idle woman.  They engaged in conversation; and he repeated the phrases that belong inevitably to such occasions.

“How horrible all this is,” he said to himself; “this is worse than peeping and botanizing on a mother’s grave.”