LAST WORDS.

—W. H. Burleigh.

"Grace, love, will you go to Willard? He has something to say to you."

The southern sun hung low in the western heavens; the day was excessively warm for April, and a little cloud in the sky, "no bigger than a man's hand," foreboded a shower. Grace turned from the window where she stood watching the shifting white clouds in the blue sky, and went back to the room from which she had stolen to hide the bitter pain at her heart.

A very solemn silence hung about the white-draped chamber. The window shutters were open to admit the balmy air, and a slanting ray of sunshine had stolen in and brightened the top of the sick man's pillow, touching into golden radiance the dark locks pushed away from his brow. The wan and wasted face wore a beautiful serenity that was not of earth. "God's finger" had "touched him" very gently, but palpably.

Grace bent over him, taking his cold white hand in hers with voiceless emotion. She had grown so fond of him in a warm, sisterly fashion, reverenced his brave, pure, upright spirit so highly that it seemed to her a close and kindred soul was winging its way from her side to the bright beyond, leaving her more alone and desolate than ever.

"It is almost over," he said, looking up at her with the reflex of a smile in the beautiful dark-gray orbs that kept their luminous radiance to the last.

She answers not. How can she break with the sounds of human grief the brooding peace that shines on the pathway of this departing spirit? Her voice, the sweetest one he will ever hear on this side of eternity, rises low but firm in one of the old-fashioned hymns the old-fashioned captain loved:

"Amen," he whispers, lowly. "His rod and His staff they comfort me."

Silence falls for a brief space. He is gathering his fainting strength for the words that come slowly from his lips:

"I have been the bearer to you of unwelcome tidings so often, Mrs. Winans, that it absolutely pains me now to recall it."

"Do not recall it," she rejoins, earnestly. "Why should you? The power overruling such things is higher than we are. You have been a comforter to me more often than you know of—take only that thought with you."

He smiles as she re-arranges his pillows, lifting his head so that his faint breath comes more evenly. The stray end of one of her long silken curls falls over his breast an instant, and he touches it with a caressing hand.

"It is given to me," he answers, "to bear you good tidings before I go. Your memories of me—will not thus be all unpleasant ones."

The eager remonstrance forming itself on her lip dies unspoken as he goes on:

"You have borne sorrow with a very brave heart, Gracie—have been, as you once told me, and as I really think, fireproof! Can you bear joy as well?"

She cannot possibly speak. Something rising in her throat literally chokes her breath.

"Little sister, be strong. Lulu has written—well, that your husband—that Winans is in London, alive and well—and is coming home to you—in May."

There is utter silence. She is quiet always, in pain or pleasure. He sees only her small hands clasping each other close, and her violet eyes—those unerring indices of her feelings—growing dusk black under the lashes. But something in the curve of her firm lip does not satisfy him. He feebly lifts his hand to touch hers.

"You will not be hard and unforgiving? It is not like Grace Winans to be that. Promise me that you will forgive him freely! If he acted wrongly he has suffered for it. It is so easy to go wrong—to err is human, you know."

No wavering in that sternly curved red lip shows acquiescence. His voice rises higher, with a throb of pain in it:

"'If ye forgive not men their trespasses how shall my Father which is in heaven forgive you?' Gracie, say 'I promise.'"

All the sudden hot anger against the husband she had loved—the husband who had wronged her, and left desolate the sweetest years of her life—fades out of her heart. The words falter as hollowly from her lips as from his:

"I promise."

"Thanks. May God bless you—and—and make all your future years happy ones. Mother—call mother, please."

She puts a little cordial to the panting lips and tearfully obeys.

On her knees at the other side of the bed the anguished mother listens to the tender message to the absent sister, the soft words of comfort, the low farewell. With the last kiss of her son on her lips she buries her face speechlessly in his pillow.

"Gracie, will you raise me a little?"

She bends with one arm under his shoulders, the other across his breast, and lifts him so that his head rests comfortably against her shoulder—an easy task, fragile and wearied as she is, for he has wasted in the grasp of that destroying fever until he is scarcely more than a wan shadow of himself.

Bending to look into his face, she asks, softly:

"Willard, are you easy now?"

"Quite easy," he answers, in a strangely contented tone, with such a tender caress in it that Grace starts; and as he falters "good-by," she bends with a sudden impulse and just touches her lips to his in a pure thrill of sisterly affection and grief; his glance lifts to hers an instant and remains fixed; a quivering sigh, a scarcely perceptible shudder, and Willard Clendenon's spirit has flown out of the earthly heaven of her arms to the higher heaven of his soul.

Later, as Grace lay weeping in her own room, the bereaved mother came gliding in. The soft flame of a wax candle lent a faint, pure light to the room, and showed her gentle face, free from tears, but seamed with a touching resignation beautiful in the extreme. What a mournful pathos lies in the grief of an old face! It is more eloquent than tears, even as silence can be more eloquent than speech.

Sitting on the edge of Grace's lounge, gently smoothing the disheveled curls with her cool fingers, it would seem as if the younger woman were the mourner, she the comforter.

"God knows best," she says, with a Christian's strong reliance; and then she added, pathetically: "And it has come to me suddenly, Gracie, child, that my poor boy was not, perhaps, quite happy, or, at least, that some grief, at which we never guessed, was mingled with the quiet thread of his life."

A sudden memory of words of his came into Grace's mind.

"God, when He puts a life-long sorrow on our hearts, usually compensates for it by giving us a brief span of life in which to endure it."

"He deserved to be happy," she answered, warmly. "He was so good, so true. If any merited perfect content, it was your son."

"You have seen him sometimes in the whirl of gay society, Grace; did you ever notice in him any peculiar attachment for a woman?"

"Never," Grace answered, wondering. "He was courteously polite, deferentially chivalrous to all, but seemed attached to none in particular. Why do you ask?"

"Because I found this—I would show it to none but you, Grace—on his poor dead heart. It tells its own sad story."

She put into the young girl's hand a broad, flat gold locket, swinging by a slight gold chain. Almost as if she touched a coffin-lid, Grace moved the spring.

It flew open. No woman's pictured face smiled back at her—the upper lid had a deeply cut inscription, February, 1871—in the other deeper side lay a dead white rose, its short, thorny stem wound about with a tangle of pale-gold hair.

That was all. A sudden memory stirred at Grace's heart, and it all came back to her. The winter morning in her conservatory at Norfolk—the white rose on her breast, the tangled, broken curl, the gentle good-by. Warm flushes of irrepressible color surged up to her pale face, and with a sudden shocked horror Mrs. Clendenon glanced from the stem of the withered rose to the soft curls she was mechanically smoothing.

It was enough. "My poor boy!" she murmured and taking Grace Winans in her tender, forgiving, motherly arms, kissed her forehead.

And the tie between the two women never grew less close and warm. The still form they carried home to Norfolk to lay in its grave was a mutual sorrowful tie between them forever.

Stella De Vere came next day, heavily vailed, on her father's arm, and kissed Captain Clendenon in his coffin, leaving a bouquet of lilies on his pulseless breast.

But at early morning's dawn a slender, white-robed form bent over him, all her golden tresses sweeping over the heart that lay under its treasured keepsake still, and a sister's pained and tender kiss rested warmly on the sealed lips whose untold secret had come so strangely into her keeping.