“Stephen, ought the living and the dead to wed with one another?  God forbid that you in your youth and manhood should take to wife such a death-like thing as I!  Four years I have lain like this waiting for the messenger to fetch me away, and now that at last he is near at hand, shall I array myself in a bridal veil for a face-cloth, and trailing skirts of silk or satin for a shroud?  Dear Stephen, don’t talk to me any more about this,—­we are brother and sister still,—­let nothing on earth break the sweetness of the bond between us.”

“Not so, Adelais,” cried he, passionately; “you cannot, you must not die yet!  You do not know what love can do, you do not know that love is stronger than death, and that where there is love like mine death dare not come!  There is nothing in all the world that I will not do for your sake, nothing that I will leave undone to save you, nothing that shall be too hard a condition for me to perform, so that I may keep you with me still.  Live, live my darling, my beloved, and be my wife!  Give me the right to take you with me, my sweet; let us go together to Madeira, to Malta, to Sicily, where the land is full of life, and the skies are warm, and the atmosphere clear and pure.  There is health there, Adelais, and youth, and air to breathe such as one cannot find in this dull, misty, heavy northern climate, and there you will grow well again, and we will think no more about death and sickness.  O my darling, my darling, for God’s sake refuse me no longer!”

She laid her thin transparent palm wearily over her left side, and turned her calm eyes on the passionate straining face beside her.

“There is that here,” she said, pressing her wounded heart more tightly, “that I know already for the touch of the messenger’s hand.  Already I count the time of my sojourn here, not by weeks nor even by days,—­the end has come so very, very near at last.  How do I know but that even now that messenger of whom I speak may be standing in our presence,—­even now, while you kneel here by my side and talk to me of life and youth and health?”

“Adelais,” pleaded the poor lover, hoarsely, “you deceive yourself, my darling!  Have you not often spoken before of dying, and yet have lived on?  O why should you die now and break my heart outright?”

“I feel a mist coming over me,” she answered, “even as I speak with you now.  I hear a sound in my ears that is not of earth, the darkness gathers before my face, the light quivers and fades, the night is closing about me very fast.  Stephen, Stephen, don’t you see that I am dying?”

He bowed his head over the damp colorless brow, and whispered:  “If it be so, my beloved, be as my wife yet, and die in my arms.”

But while he uttered the words there came a change over her,—­a shadow into the sweet eyes and a sudden spasm of pain across the white parted lips.  Feebly and uncertainly she put out her hands before her face, like one groping in the darkness, her golden head drooped on his shoulder, and her breath came sharp and thick, with the sound of approaching death.  Stephen folded his arms about her with a cry of agony, and pressed the poor quivering hands wildly to his bosom, as though he would fain have held them there for ever.