cks of fashionable
women in a mocking way that Sheila did not quite like; and of course
she naturally threw the blame on Mrs. Lavender. It was only when this
old lady exerted a godless influence over him that her good boy talked
in such a fashion. There was nothing of that about him up in Lewis,
nor yet at home in a certain snug little smoking-room which these two
had come to consider the most comfortable corner in the house. Sheila
began to hate women who used lip-salve, and silently recorded a vow
that never, never, never would she wear anybody's hair but her own.

"Do you suffer from headaches?" said Mrs. Lavender abruptly.

"Sometimes," said Sheila.

"How often? What is an average? Two a week?"

"Oh, sometimes I have not a head-ache for three or four months at a
time."

"No toothache?"

"No."

"What did your mother die of?"

"It was a fever," said Sheila in a low voice, "and she caught it while
she was helping a family that was very bad with the fever."

"Does your father ever suffer from rheumatism?"

"No," said Sheila. "My papa is the strongest man in the Lewis--I am
sure of that."

"But the strongest of us, you know," said Mrs. Lavender, looking
hardly at the girl--"the strongest of us will die and go into the
general order of the universe; and it is a good thing for you that, as
you say, you are not afraid. Why should you be afraid? Listen to this
passage." She opened the red book, and guided herself to a certain
page by one of a series of colored ribbons: "'He who fears death
either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation.
But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm;
and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a
different kind of living being, and thou wilt not cease to live.' Do
you perceive the wisdom of that?"

"Yes," said Sheila, and her own voice seemed hollow and strange to her
in this big and dimly-lit chamber.

Mrs. Lavender turned over a few more pages, and proceeded to read
again; and as she did so, in a slow, unsympathetic, monotonous voice,
a spell came over the girl, the weight at her heart grew more and more
intolerable, and the room seemed to grow darker: "'Short, then, is the
time which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he
lives; and short, too, the longest posthumous fame, and even this only
continued by a succession of poor human beings, who will very soon
die, and who know not even thems