It may have been
chance: yet, let us think it was not chance; let us believe that
He, who had made the world warm and happy for her, chose that
this best voice of all should bid her good-bye at the last.
So the Old Year went out in that music. The dull eyes, loving to
the end, wandered vaguely as the sounds died away, as if losing
something,--losing all, suddenly. She sighed as the clock
struck, and then a strange calm, unknown before, stole over her
face; her eyes flashed open with a living joy. Margret stooped
to close them, kissing the cold lids; and Tiger, who had climbed
upon the bed, whined and crept down.
"It is the New Year," said Holmes, bending his head.
The cripple was dead; but LOIS, free, loving, and beloved,
trembled from her prison to her Master's side in the To-Morrow.
I can show you her grave out there in the hills,--a short,
stunted grave, like a child's. No one goes there, although there
are many firesides where they speak of "Lois" softly, as of
something holy and dear: but they think of her always as not
there; as gone home; even old Yare looks up, when he talks of "my
girl." Yet, knowing that nothing in God's just universe is lost,
or fails to meet the late fulfilment of its hope, I like to think
of her poor body lying there: I like to believe that the great
mother was glad to receive the form that want and crime of men
had thwarted,--took her uncouth child home again, that had been
so cruelly wronged,--folded it in her warm bosom with tender,
palpitating love.
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