" Once they thought he fancied he was
showing his children to Viola or to me. Once, when Dermot's face
came before him, he recurred to some of the words used in the
struggle about Viola.
"I don't deserve her. Good things are not for me. All will be made
pure there."
They thought then that he was himself, and knew he was dying, but the
next moment some words, evidently addressed to his child, showed them
he was not in our world; and after that all the murmurs were about
what had last taken up his mind--the Bread of Heaven, the Fruit of
Everlasting Life.
"To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the Fruit of the Tree
of Life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God." That was
what Mr. Yolland ventured now to say over him, and it woke the last
respondent glance of his eyes. He had tasted of that Feast of Life
on the Sunday he was alone, and Ben Yolland would even then have
given it to him, but before it could be arranged, he could no longer
swallow, and the affection of the brain was fast blocking up the
senses, so that blindness and deafness came on, and passed into that
insensibility in which the last struggles of life are, as they tell
us, rather agonising to the beholder than to the sufferer. It was at
sundown at last that the mightiest and gentlest spirit I ever knew
was set free.
Those three durst not wait to mourn.
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