bedroom grate and made a bright fire, she brough hot milk and
brandy.
"Thank you, dear, thank you. It's a bronchial cold," whispered Miss
Frost hurriedly, trying to sip the milk. She could not. She didn't
want it.
"I've sent for the doctor," said Alvina, in her cool voice, wherein
none the less there rang the old hesitancy of sheer love.
Miss Frost lifted her eyes:
"There's no need," she said, and she smiled winsomely at Alvina.
It was pneumonia. Useless to talk of the distracted anguish of
Alvina during the next two days. She was so swift and sensitive in
her nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody.
In her silence her soul was alone with the soul of her darling. The
long semi-consciousness and the tearing pain of pneumonia, the
anguished sickness.
But sometimes the grey eyes would open and smile with delicate
winsomeness at Alvina, and Alvina smiled back, with a cheery,
answering winsomeness. But that costs something.
On the evening of the second day, Miss Frost got her hand from under
the bedclothes, and laid it on Alvina's hand. Alvina leaned down to
her.
"Everything is for you, my love," whispered Miss Frost, looking with
strange eyes on Alvina's face.
"Don't talk, Miss Frost," moaned Alvina.
"Everything is for you," murmured the sick woman--"except--" and she
enumerated some tiny legacies which showed her generous, thoughtful
nature.
"Yes, I shall remember," said Alvina, beyond tears now.
Miss Frost smiled with her old bright, wonderful look, that had a
touch of queenliness in it.
"Kiss me, dear," she whispered.
Alvina kissed her, and could not suppress the whimpering of her
too-much grief.
The night passed slowly. Sometimes the grey eyes of the sick woman
rested dark, dilated, haggard on Alvina's face, with a heavy, almost
accusing look, sinister. Then they closed again. And sometimes they
looked pathetic, with a mute, stricken appeal. Then again they
closed--only to open again tense with pain. Alvina wiped her
blood-phlegmed lips.
In the morning she died--lay there haggard, death-smeared, with her
lovely white hair smeared also, and disorderly: she who had been so
beautiful and clean always.
Alvina knew death--which is untellable. She knew that her darling
carried away a portion of her own soul into death.
But she was alone. And the agony of being alone, the agony of grief,
passionate, passionate grief for her darling who was torn into
death--the agony of self-reproach, regret; the agony of remembrance;
the agony of the looks of the dying woman, winsome, and sinisterly
accusing, and pathetically, despairingly appealing--probe after
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