“Why, my goodness, one’d say she’d gone through it herself,” ejaculated Mrs. Sumfit, terrified.

Dahlia sent her eyes at Rhoda.

“I must go and see that poor man covered.”  Mrs. Sumfit succumbed to a fit of resolution much under the pretence that it had long been forming.

“Well, and mother,” said Dahlia, checking her, “promise me.  Put a feather on my mouth; put a glass to my face, before you let them carry me out.  Will you?  Rhoda promises.  I have asked her.”

“Oh! the ideas of this girl!” Mrs. Sumfit burst out.  “And looking so, as she says it.  My love, you didn’t mean to die?”

Dahlia soothed her, and sent her off.

“I am buried alive!” she said.  “I feel it all—­the stifling! the hopeless cramp!  Let us go and garden.  Rhoda, have you got laudanum in the house?”

Rhoda shook her head, too sick at heart to speak.  They went into the garden, which was Dahlia’s healthfullest place.  It seemed to her that her dead mother talked to her there.  That was not a figure of speech, when she said she felt buried alive.  She was in the state of sensational delusion.  There were times when she watched her own power of motion curiously:  curiously stretched out her hands, and touched things, and moved them.  The sight was convincing, but the shudder came again.  In a frame less robust the brain would have given way.  It was the very soundness of the brain which, when her blood was a simple tide of life in her veins, and no vital force, had condemned her to see the wisdom and the righteousness of the act of sacrifice committed by her, and had urged her even up to the altar.  Then the sudden throwing off of the mask by that man to whom she had bound herself, and the reading of Edward’s letter of penitence and love, thwarted reason, but without blinding or unsettling it.  Passion grew dominant; yet against such deadly matters on all sides had passion to strive, that, under a darkened sky, visibly chained, bound down, and hopeless, she felt between-whiles veritably that she was a living body buried.  Her senses had become semi-lunatic.

She talked reasonably; and Rhoda, hearing her question and answer at meal-times like a sane woman, was in doubt whether her sister wilfully simulated a partial insanity when they were alone together.  Now, in the garden, Dahlia said:  “All those flowers, my dear, have roots in mother and me.  She can’t feel them, for her soul’s in heaven.  But mine is down there.  The pain is the trying to get your soul loose.  It’s the edge of a knife that won’t cut through.  Do you know that?”

Rhoda said, as acquiescingly as she could, “Yes.”

“Do you?” Dahlia whispered.  “It’s what they call the ‘agony.’  Only, to go through it in the dark, when you are all alone! boarded round! you will never know that.  And there’s an angel brings me one of mother’s roses, and I smell it.  I see fields of snow; and it’s warm there, and no labour for breath.  I see great beds of flowers; I pass them like a breeze.  I’m shot, and knock on the ground, and they bury me for dead again.  Indeed, dearest, it’s true.”