Tell me you love me and always will. Tell me, so that when I dream I
may dream of Love, and when I sleep dreamless Love may be holding me
in his wings, and when I wake Love may be the spirit in my feet, and
when I die Love may be the Angel that takes me home.

And in the room of death, when the last silence fell on those gathered
there, her sister Margot--by Laura's wish, expressed some time
before--read aloud the "will," in which she spoke her inmost heart.
Since its publication it belongs to those records of life and feeling
which are part of our common inheritance.

"She was a flame, beautiful, dancing, ardent," writes the second Mrs.
Lyttelton. "The wind of life was too fierce for such a spirit; she could
not live in it."

I make no apology for dwelling on the life and earthly death of this
young creature who was only known to a band--though a large band--of
friends during her short years. Throughout social and literary history
there have been a few apparitions like hers, which touch with peculiar
force, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which
"make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death--they are the great themes
with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given
to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet
without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected
whose who knew her like the finest things in poetry.



CHAPTER II