A White Heron and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett

They opened the door into a small entry with a steep stairway; they climbed the creaking stairs, and entered the cold upper room on tiptoe. Mrs. Crowe’s heart began to beat very fast as the lamp was put on a high bureau, and made long, fixed shadows about the walls. She went hesitatingly toward the solemn shape under its white drapery, and felt a sense of remonstrance as Sarah Ann gently, but in a business-like way, turned back the thin sheet.
    â€œSeems to me she looks pleasanter and pleasanter,” whispered Sarah Ann Binson impulsively, as they gazed at the white face with its wonderful smile. “To-morrow ’t will all have faded out. I do believe they kind of wake up a day or two after they die, and it’s then they go.” She replaced the light covering, and they both turned quickly away; there was a chill in this upper room.
    â€œâ€™T is a great thing for anybody to have got through, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Crowe softly, as she began to go down the stairs on tiptoe. The warm air from the kitchen beneath met them with a sense of welcome and shelter.
    â€œI don’ know why it is, but I feel as near again to Tempy down here as I do up there,” replied Sister Binson. “I feel as if the air was full of her, kind of. I can sense things, now and then, that she seems to say. Now I never was one to take up with no nonsense of sperits and such, but I declare I felt as if she told me just now to put some more wood into the stove.”
    Mrs. Crowe preserved a gloomy silence. She had suspected before this that her companion was of a weaker and more credulous disposition than herself “’T is a great thing to have got through,” she repeated, ignoring definitely all that had last been said. “I suppose you know as well as I that Tempy was one that always feared death. Well, it’s all put behind her now; she knows what ’t is.” Mrs. Crowe gave a little sigh, and Sister Binson’s quick sympathies were stirred toward this other old friend, who also dreaded the great change.
    â€œI’d never like to forgit almost those last words Tempy spoke plain to me,” she said gently, like the comforter she truly was. “She looked up at me once or twice, that last afternoon after I come to set by her, and let Mis’ Owen go home; and I says, ‘Can I do anything to ease you, Tempy?’ and the tears come into my eyes so I couldn’t see what kind of a nod she give me. ‘No, Sarah Ann, you can’t, dear,’ says she; and then she got her breath again, and says she, looking at me real meanin’, ‘I’m only a-gettin’ sleepier and sleepier; that’s all there is,’ says she, and smiled up at me kind of wishful, and shut her eyes. I knew well enough all she meant. She’d been lookin’ out for a chance to tell me, and I don’ know’s she ever said much afterwards.”
    Mrs. Crowe was not knitting; she had been listening too eagerly. “Yes, ’t will be a comfort to think of that sometimes,” she said, in acknowledgment.
    â€œI know that old Dr. Prince said once, in evenin’ meetin’, that he’d watched by many a dyin’ bed, as we well knew, and enough o’ his sick folks had been scared o’ dyin’ their whole lives through; but when they come to the last, he’d never seen one but was willin’, and most were glad, to go. ”T is as natural as bein’ born or livin’ on,’ he said. I don’t know what had moved him to speak that night. You know he wa’n’t in the habit of it, and ’t was the monthly concert of prayer for foreign missions anyways,” said Sarah Ann; ”but ’t was a great stay to the mind to listen to his words of experience.”
    â€œThere never was a better man,” responded Mrs. Crowe, in a really cheerful tone. She had recovered from her feeling of nervous dread, the kitchen was so