"It is not that!" Lucy cried, "though it breaks my heart to think of you gone forever. How can I live without you? What shall I do when my expiatory work is finished?"
"Expiatory work?" Robin repeated, questioningly. "What do you mean? What have you to expiate?--you, the noblest, most unselfish sister in the world!"
"Much, much. Oh, Robbie, I cannot let you die with this upon my mind, even if the confession turn your love for me into hate--and you do love me, I have made your life a little less sad than it might have been but for me."
"Yes, sister, you have made my life so full of happiness that, darkened as it is, I would like to cling to it longer, though I know heaven is so much better."
"Thank you, Robbie--thank you for that" Lucy said; then, lifting up her head, and looking straight into her brother's face, she continued: "You say you have a faint recollection of the grass, and the flowers, and the trees in the park. Have you also any remembrance, however slight, how I looked when we were little children playing together at home?"
"I don't know for sure," Robin replied, while for an instant a deep flush stained his pale cheeks: "I don't know for sure. Sometimes out of those dim shadows of the past which I have struggled so hard to retain, there comes a vision of a little girl--or, rather, there is a picture which comes before my mind more distinct than the grass, and the trees, and the flowers, though I always try to put it away; but it repeats itself over and over again, and I see it in my dreams so vividly, and especially of late, when life is slipping from me."
"What is the picture?" Lucy said, and her face was whiter than the one above her.
"It is this," Robin replied. "I seem to see myself looking up, with outstretched arms, toward a little girl who is standing above me, looking down at me with a face which cannot--cannot be the one I shall welcome to heaven and know as my sister's; for this in the picture has a cruel expression on it, and there is hatred in the eyes, which are so large and black, and stare so fixedly at me. Then there is a crash, and darkness, and a horrible pain, and loud cries, and the eyes fade away in the blackness, and I know no more till you are sobbing over me and begging me to say that I can see you. I remember that, I am sure, or else it has been told me so often that it seems as if I did; but the other, the face above me, is all a fancy and a delusion of the brain. You never looked at me that way--never could."