Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/253

Rh "Mary, dearest," said he, "if there is a little bit of life left only to you, let it be to me also." "Dick, I can but be a burden."

"That—never—a joy as long as you are with me. Give me the one thing I have thought of, worked for, if it be but for a year or two." "A year or two! Oh, Dick, only perhaps a month." "Then let this month be our honeymoon." And so it was. The faithful fellow, true to everyone with whom he was brought in contact, was true to his dying love. She came, ghostlike, to church, and I shall never forget the pathos, the tenderness, the sincerity with which each took the irrevocable vows which bound in one the ebbing scrap of one life with the flowing vigour of the other. Richard moved his frail, fading Mary to the pretty gardener's cottage at Lord St. Ledger's. There she ebbed away, happy, peaceful, with the love and devotion of her husband surrounding her.