her with kind
inquiries, loving cheering words and a message from Dick, whom she had
seen a few days before.

Molly sat thinking it over gratefully, after her cousin had left the room.

"How kind and thoughtful for others she is! how sweet and gentle, how
patient and resigned. I will try to be more like her. How truly she obeys
the command 'Be pitiful, be courteous.'

"But why should one so lovely, so devoted a Christian, be visited with so
sore a trial? I can see why my trials were sent. I was so proud and
worldly; and they were necessary to show me my need of Jesus; but she has
loved and leaned upon him since she was a little child."

CHAPTER TWENTIETH.

"Let them die,
Let them die now, thy children! so thy heart
Shall wear their beautiful image all undimm'd
Within it to the last."
--MRS. HEMANS.

Lily seemed a little stronger in the morning, and the brothers and sisters
were allowed to go in by turns and speak to her.

Violet chose to be the last, thinking that would, perhaps, secure a little
longer interview.

Lily with mamma by her side, lay propped up with pillows--her eyes bright,
a lovely color on her almost transparent cheek, her luxurious hair lying
about her like heaps of shining gold, her red lips smiling a joyous
welcome, as Vi stooped over her.

Could it be that she was dying?

"Oh, darling, you may get well even yet?" cried Vi, in tones tremulous
with joy and hope.

Lily smiled, and stroked her sister's face lovingly with her little thin
white hand.

Violet was startled by its scorching heat.

"You are burning up with fever!" she exclaimed, tears gushing from her
eyes.

"Yes; but I shall soon be well," said the child clasping her sister
close; "I'm going home to the happy land to be with Jesus, Vi; oh, don't
you wish you were going too? Mamma I'm tired; please tell Vi my text."

"'And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick; the people that dwell
therein shall be forgiven their iniquity,'" the mother repeated in a low
sweet voice.

"For Jesus' sake," softly added the dying one. "He has loved me and washed
me from my sins in his own blood."

Vi fell on her knees by the bedside, and buried her face in the clothes,
vainly trying to stifle her bursting sobs.

"Poor Vi," sighed Lily. "Mamma, comfort her."

Mamma drew the weeper to her bosom, and spoke tenderly to her of the
loving Saviour and the home he has gone to