Tim's tale was long, and it was interrupted by frequent intervals of rest made necessary by his weakness. When he ended, the pale forecast of dawn shone into the squalid room. Louizy was crying softly, in the suppressed fashion of folk unaccustomed to give full vent even to grief. Tim lay quiet for a long time. At last he aroused himself to feel beneath the mattress, and to bring to light a dirty bag of denim. This he pressed into the hand of his nurse.
"It'll take you both," he murmured feebly. "Blessings go with ye, and the saints be good to the soul of Tim Calligan, coming up at the Day of Judgment like a scared woodchuck out of unblessed ground!"
Tim failed rapidly. The excitement of his dream and the moral struggle through which he had passed had worn upon his enfeebled powers. On the second day after his seizure the priest came from Tiverton to administer the last rites. When this was over, Tim lay quiet, hardly seeming alive. Thus he was when Springer, who drove over late in the afternoon, came in to see him.
"Tim," Springer said, "Mrs. Dooling has told me what you have done. The ground you lie in will make little difference to a man that would do a thing so white as that."
"Thank you kindly," Tim answered, in the shadow of a voice. "Father O'Connor's promised to bless my grave. It's not the same as being at Tiverton where the ground would be soaked with the blessing all round, but leastways St. Peter 'll not be after flinging it in my face that the blood of the child's on me."
The Overseer regarded him with such tenderness as did not often shine within the doors of the poor-farm.
"Tim," he said, leaning forward as if he were half ashamed of his good impulse, "don't worry any more. I'll pay for your grave at Tiverton, and see that you are put in it."
The old pauper turned upon him a glance of positive rapture. He clasped his thin, withered hands, trembling like rushes in the winds of autumn.
"Holy and Blessed Virgin," he prayed, almost with a sob, "be good to him for giving a poor old dying creature the wish of his heart! Blessed St. Peter--"
But the rush of joy was too great. With a face of ecstasy the old man died.
When Alice Gaylord was, by the death of her grandmother, set free from the long servitude of attending upon the invalid, it might have seemed that nothing need hinder the fulfilling of her protracted engagement to Dr. Carroll. The friends of both the young people expressed, in decorous fashion, their satisfaction that old Mrs. Gaylord, ninety and bed-ridden, should at last have been released, and it was entirely well understood that what they meant was to signify their pleasure at the ending of Alice's tedious waiting. Some doubt in regard to the girl's health, however, still clouded the prospect. Long care and confinement had told on her; and when a decent interval had passed after the death, and the wedding did not take place, people began to say that it was such a pity that Alice was not well enough to be married.