The days went on. Every day Mark said, “Now, majie, I do think today I shall tell Corney my dream and the message I have for him.” But each day passed and the dream was not told. The next and the next and the next passed and he seemed to the major not likely ever to have the strength to tell Corney. Still, even his mother, who was almost constantly in the room during the day, did not perceive that his time was drawing nigh. Hester also was much with him now, and sometimes his father, occasionally Corney and Mrs. Corney, as Mark called her with a merry look—very pale on his almost transparent face. But none of them seemed to think his end quite near. When several were in the room, he would lie looking from one to another like a miser contemplating his riches—and well he might! For such riches neither moth nor rust corrupt, and they are the treasures of heaven also. He took everything that came to him as in itself right. He seemed in his illness to love everybody more than even while he was well.

One evening most of the family were in the room. A vague sense had diffused itself that the end was not far off, and an unspoken instinct had gathered them.

A lamp was burning low, but the firelight was stronger.

Mark spoke. In a moment the major was bending over him.

“Majie,” he whispered, “I want Corney. I want to tell him.”

The major went to find the brother, and on his way met the father and told him that the end was near. With a sorely self-accusing heart, for the vision of the boy seated in the middle of the cold moor the day of their walk haunted him, he went quickly to the boy’s room, the anteroom of heaven.

Mark kept looking for Corney’s coming, his eyes turning every other moment to the door. When his father entered, he stretched out his arms to him. The strong man bent over him and could not repress a sob. The boy pushed him gently back far enough to see his face.

“Father,” he said—he had never called him father before—“you must be glad, not sorry. I am going to your father and my father. He is waiting for me.”

Then seeing Corney come in, he stretched his arms toward him past his father.

“Corney! Corney!” he cried, just as he used to call him when he was a mere child. Corney bent over him, but the outstretched arms did not close around him. They fell.

But he was not yet ascended. Feebly he signed to the major.

“Majie,” he whispered, with a look and expression for which the major tried the rest of his life to find the meaning. “Majie! Corney! You tell!”

Then he went.
I think it was the grief at the grave of Lazarus that made our Lord weep, not his death. One with eyes opening into both worlds could hardly weep over any law of the Father of Lights! I think it was the impossibility of getting them comforted over this thing death, which looked to him so different from what they thought it, that made the fearless weep, and give them in Lazarus a foretaste of his own resurrection.