He looks at her half gratefully, half reproachfully.

"Anne, why are you here?" he asks, in a low, laboured voice. "Did
they not give you my message?"

For answer she turns her deep eyes upon him.

"Would you have gone away and left me here to die?" she questions
him, with a faint smile.

She bends her head down nearer to him, so that her soft hair falls
about his face.

"Our lives were one, dear," she whispers to him. "I could not have
lived without you; God knew that. We shall be together always."

She kisses him, and laying his head upon her breast, softly strokes
it as she might a child's; and he puts his weak arms around her.

Later on she feels them growing cold about her, and lays him gently
back upon the bed, looks for the last time into his eyes, then draws
the lids down over them.

His people ask that they may bury him in the churchyard hard by, so
that he may always be among them; and, Anne consenting, they do all
things needful with their own hands, wishful that no unloving labour
may be mingled with their work. They lay him close to the porch,
where, going in and out the church, their feet will pass near to him;
and one among them who is cunning with the graver's chisel shapes the
stone.