“Yes! Agnes, my dear girl!” I said, bending over her. “I tried to tell you, when we met to-day, something that has been in my thoughts since Dora died. You remember, when you came down to me in our little room—pointing upward, Agnes?”

“Oh Trotwood!” she returned, her eyes filled with tears. “So loving, so confiding, and so young! Can I ever forget?”

“As you were then, my sister, I have often thought since, you have ever been to me. Ever pointing upward, Agnes; ever leading me to something better; ever directing me to higher things!”

She only shook her head; through her tears I saw the same sad quiet smile.

“And I am so grateful to you for it, Agnes, so bound to you, that there is no name for the affection of my heart. I want you to know, yet don’t know how to tell you, that all my life long I shall look up to you, and be guided by you, as I have been through the darkness that is past. Whatever betides, whatever new ties you may form, whatever changes may come between us, I shall always look to you, and love you, as I do now, and have always done. You will always be my solace and resource, as you have always been. Until I die, my dearest sister, I shall see you always before me, pointing upward!”

She put her hand in mine, and told me she was proud of me, and of what I said; although I praised her very far beyond her worth. Then she went on softly playing, but without removing her eyes from me.

“Do you know, what I have heard to-night, Agnes,” said I, “strangely seems to be a part of the feeling with which I regarded you when I saw you first—with which I sat beside you in my rough school-days?”

“You knew I had no mother,” she replied with a smile, “and felt kindly towards me.”

“More than that, Agnes. I knew, almost as if I had known this story, that there was something inexplicably gentle and softened surrounding you; something that might have been sorrowful in some one else (as I can now understand it was), but was not so in you.”

She softly played on, looking at me still.

“Will you laugh at my cherishing such fancies, Agnes?”

“No!”

“Or at my saying that I really believe I felt, even then, that you could be faithfully affectionate against all discouragement, and never cease to be so, until you ceased to live?—Will you laugh at such a dream?”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!”

For an instant a distressful shadow crossed her face; but, even in the start it gave me, it was gone; and she was playing on, and looking at me with her own calm smile.

As I rode back in the lonely night, the wind going by me like a restless memory, I thought of this, and feared she was not happy. I was not happy; but, thus far, I had faithfully set the seal upon the Past, and, thinking of her, pointing upward, thought of her as pointing to that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.