it all--giving her life, her all, that the others might
live--a terrible tightening gathered around Alice Westmore's heart,
her head fell with the flooding tears and she knelt sobbing, her
bloodless fingers clutching the bed of the dying girl.

"Don't cry," said Maggie. "I should be the one to weep, ... only I am so
happy ... to think ... I am loved by the noblest, best, of men, ... an'
I love him so, ... only he ain't here; ... but I wouldn't have him see
me die. Now--now ... what I want to know, Bishop, ..." she tried to
rise. She seemed to be passing away. The old man caught her and held her
in his arms.

Her eyes opened: "I--is--" she went on, in the agony of it all with the
same breath, "am ... am I married ... in God's sight ... as well as
his--"

The old man held her tenderly as if she were a child. He smiled calmly,
sweetly, into her eyes as he said:

"You believed it an' you loved only him, Maggie--poor chile!"

"Oh, yes--yes--" she smiled, "an' now--even now I love him up--right
up--as you see ... to the door, ... to the shadow, ... to the valley
of the shadow...."

"And it went for these, for these"--he said looking around at the
room.

"For them--my little ones--they had no mother, you kno'--an' Daddy's
back. Oh, I didn't mind the work, ... the mill that has killed ...
killed me, ... but, ... but was I"--her voice rose to a shrill cry of
agony--"am I married in God's sight?"

Alice quivered in the beauty of the answer which came back from the old
man's lips:

"As sure as God lives, you were--there now--sleep and rest; it is all
right, child."

Then a sweet calmness settled over her face, and with it a smile of
exquisite happiness.

She fell back on her pillow: "In God's sight ... married ... married ...
my--Oh, I have never said it before ... but now, ... can't I?"

The Bishop nodded, smiling.

"My husband, ... my husband, ... dear heart, ... Good-bye...."

She tried to reach under her pillow to draw out something, and then
she smiled and died.

When Alice Westmore dressed her for burial an hour afterwards, her
heart was shaken with a bitterness it had never known before--a
bitterness which in a man would have been a vengeance. For there was
the smile still on the dead face, carried into the presence of God.

Under the dead girl's pillow lay the picture of Richard Travis.

The next day Alice sent the picture to Richard Travis, and with it a
note.

"_It is your's_," she wrote calmly,