d he will be
proud to have helped."

"Oh, mercy, mercy!" cried Verena, burying her head in Miss Birdseye's
lap.

"You are not mistaken if you think I desire above all things that your
weakness, your generosity, should be protected," Ransom said, rather
ambiguously, but with pointed respectfulness. "I shall remember you as
an example of what women are capable of," he added; and he had no
subsequent compunctions for the speech, for he thought poor Miss
Birdseye, for all her absence of profile, essentially feminine.

A kind of frantic moan from Olive Chancellor responded to these words,
which had evidently struck her as an insolent sarcasm; and at the same
moment Doctor Prance sent Ransom a glance which was an adjuration to
depart.

"Good-bye, Olive Chancellor," Miss Birdseye murmured. "I don't want to
stay, though I should like to see what you will see."

"I shall see nothing but shame and ruin!" Olive shrieked, rushing across
to her old friend, while Ransom discreetly quitted the scene.

XXXIX

He met Doctor Prance in the village the next morning, and as soon as he
looked at her he saw that the event which had been impending at Miss
Chancellor's had taken place. It was not that her aspect was funereal;
but it contained, somehow, an announcement that she had, for the
present, no more thought to give to casting a line. Miss Birdseye had
quietly passed away, in the evening, an hour or two after Ransom's
visit. They had wheeled her chair into the house; there had been nothing
to do but wait for complete extinction. Miss Chancellor and Miss Tarrant
had sat by her there, without moving, each of her hands in theirs, and
she had just melted away, towards eight o'clock. It was a lovely death;
Doctor Prance intimated that she had never seen any that she thought
more seasonable. She added that she was a good woman--one of the old
sort; and that was the only funeral oration that Basil Ransom was
destined to hear pronounced upon Miss Birdseye. The impression of the
simplicity and humility of her end remained with him, and he reflected
more than once, during the days that followed, that the absence of pomp
and circumstance which had marked her career marked also the
consecration of her memory. She had been almost celebrated, she had been
active, earnest, ubiquitous beyond any one else, she had given herself
utterly to charities and creeds and causes; and yet the only persons,
apparently, to whom her death made a real