No nursing—­no energetic strong-minded woman could help Miss Brown now.  There was that in the room as we entered which was stronger than us all, and made us shrink into solemn awestruck helplessness.  Miss Brown was dying.  We hardly knew her voice, it was so devoid of the complaining tone we had always associated with it.  Miss Jessie told me afterwards that it, and her face too, were just what they had been formerly, when her mother’s death left her the young anxious head of the family, of whom only Miss Jessie survived.

She was conscious of her sister’s presence, though not, I think, of ours.  We stood a little behind the curtain:  Miss Jessie knelt with her face near her sister’s, in order to catch the last soft awful whispers.

“Oh, Jessie!  Jessie!  How selfish I have been!  God forgive me for letting you sacrifice yourself for me as you did!  I have so loved you—­and yet I have thought only of myself.  God forgive me!”

“Hush, love! hush!” said Miss Jessie, sobbing.

“And my father, my dear, dear father!  I will not complain now, if God will give me strength to be patient.  But, oh, Jessie! tell my father how I longed and yearned to see him at last, and to ask his forgiveness.  He can never know now how I loved him—­oh! if I might but tell him, before I die!  What a life of sorrow his has been, and I have done so little to cheer him!”

A light came into Miss Jessie’s face.  “Would it comfort you, dearest, to think that he does know?—­would it comfort you, love, to know that his cares, his sorrows”—­Her voice quivered, but she steadied it into calmness—­“Mary! he has gone before you to the place where the weary are at rest.  He knows now how you loved him.”

A strange look, which was not distress, came over Miss Brown’s face.  She did not speak for come time, but then we saw her lips form the words, rather than heard the sound—­“Father, mother, Harry, Archy;”—­then, as if it were a new idea throwing a filmy shadow over her darkened mind—­“But you will be alone, Jessie!”

Miss Jessie had been feeling this all during the silence, I think; for the tears rolled down her cheeks like rain, at these words, and she could not answer at first.  Then she put her hands together tight, and lifted them up, and said—­but not to us—­“Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

In a few moments more Miss Brown lay calm and still—­never to sorrow or murmur more.

After this second funeral, Miss Jenkyns insisted that Miss Jessie should come to stay with her rather than go back to the desolate house, which, in fact, we learned from Miss Jessie, must now be given up, as she had not wherewithal to maintain it.  She had something above twenty pounds a year, besides the interest of the money for which the furniture would sell; but she could not live upon that:  and so we talked over her qualifications for earning money.

“I can sew neatly,” said she, “and I like nursing.  I think, too, I could manage a house, if any one would try me as housekeeper; or I would go into a shop as saleswoman, if they would have patience with me at first.”