CHAPTER LXXIX.

SHOWING HOW LITTLE LILY’S LIFE BEGAN TO CHANGE INTO A RETROSPECT; AND HOW ON A SUDDEN SHE BEGAN TO FEEL BETTER.

As time wore on, little Lilias was not better.  When she had read her Bible, and closed it, she would sit long silent, with a sad look, thinking; and often she would ask old Sally questions about her mother, and listen to her, looking all the time with a strange and earnest gaze through the glass door upon the evergreens and the early snowdrops.  And old Sally was troubled somehow, and saddened at her dwelling so much upon this theme.

And one evening, as they sat together in the drawing-room—­she and the good old rector—­she asked him, too, gently, about her; for he never shrank from talking of the beloved dead, but used to speak of her often, with a simple tenderness, as if she were still living.

In this he was right.  Why should we be afraid to speak of those of whom we think so continually?  She is not dead, but sleepeth!  I have met a few, and they very good men, who spoke of their beloved dead with this cheery affection, and mingled their pleasant and loving remembrances of them in their common talk; and often I wished that, when I am laid up in the bosom of our common mother earth, those who loved me would keep my memory thus socially alive, and allow my name, when I shall answer to it no more, to mingle still in their affectionate and merry intercourse.

‘Some conflicts my darling had the day before her departure,’ he said; ’but such as through God’s goodness lasted not long, and ended in the comfort that continued to her end, which was so quiet and so peaceable, we who were nearest about her, knew not the moment of her departure.  And little Lily was then but an infant—­a tiny little thing.  Ah! if my darling had been spared to see her grown-up, such a beauty, and so like her!’

And so he rambled on; and when he looked at her, little Lily was weeping; and as he looked she said, trying to smile—­

’Indeed, I don’t know why I’m crying, darling.  There’s nothing the matter with your little Lily—­only I can’t help crying:  and I’m your foolish little Lily, you know.’

And this often happened, that he found she was weeping when he looked on her suddenly, and she used to try to smile, and both, then, to cry together, and neither say what they feared, only each unspeakably more tender and loving.  Ah, yes! in their love was mingling now something of the yearning of a farewell, which neither would acknowledge.

‘Now, while they lay here,’ says sweet John Bunyan, in his ’Pilgrim’s Progress,’ ’and waited for the good hour, there was a noise in the town that there was a post come from the celestial city, with matter of great importance to one Christiana.  So enquiry was made for her, and the house was found out where she was; so the post presented her with a letter, the contents whereof were, “Hail, thou good one!  I bring thee tidings that the Master calleth for thee, and expecteth that thou shouldst stand in his presence, in clothes of immortality, within these ten days."’