en
sleepless and talkative, telling me many things about his life.
Finally he told me of Margaret.

I knew a little about her ... that she had been his sweetheart and had
died very young. Mr. Lawrence had remained true to her memory ever
since, but I had never heard him speak of her before.

"She was very beautiful," he said dreamily, "and she was only eighteen
when she died, Jeanette. She had wonderful pale-golden hair and
dark-brown eyes. I have a little ivory miniature of her. When I die it
is to be given to you, Jeanette. I have waited a long while for her.
You know she promised she would come."

I did not understand his meaning and kept silence, thinking that he
might be wandering a little in his mind.

"She promised she would come and she will keep her word," he went on.
"I was with her when she died. I held her in my arms. She said to me,
'Herbert, I promise that I will be true to you forever, through as
many years of lonely heaven as I must know before you come. And when
your time is at hand I will come to make your deathbed easy as you
have made mine. I will come, Herbert.' She solemnly promised,
Jeanette. We made a death-tryst of it. And I know she will come."

He had fallen asleep then and after his recovery he had not alluded to
the matter again. I had forgotten it, but I recalled it now as I sat
on the steps among the geraniums that June evening. I liked to think
of Margaret ... the lovely girl who had died so long ago, taking her
lover's heart with her to the grave. She had been a sister of my
grandfather, and people told me that I resembled her slightly. Perhaps
that was why old Mr. Lawrence had always made such a pet of me.

Presently the doctor came out and nodded to me cheerily. I asked him
how Mr. Lawrence was.

"Better ... better," he said briskly. "He will be all right tomorrow.
The attack was very slight. Yes, of course you may go in. Don't stay
longer than half an hour."

Mrs. Stewart, Mr. Lawrence's sister, was in the sickroom when I went
in. She took advantage of my presence to lie down on the sofa a little
while, for she had been up all the preceding night. Mr. Lawrence
turned his fine old silver head on the pillow and smiled a greeting.
He was a very handsome old man; neither age nor illness had marred his
finely modelled face or impaired the flash of his keen, steel-blue
eyes. He seemed quite well and talked naturally and easily of many
commonplace things.

At the end of the docto