Did you ever suspect
what cause it was that occasioned your sister's death?"
"I only knew what my father told me, an d what all our friends
believed--that she had a tumor in the neck, or, as I sometimes
heard it stated, from the effect on her constitution of a tumor
in the neck."
"She died under an operation for the removal of that tumor," said
the priest, in low tones; "and the operator was your Uncle
George."
In those few words all the truth burst upon me.
"Console yourself with the thought that the long martyrdom of his
life is over," the priest went on. "He rests; he is at peace. He
and his little darling understand each other, and are happy now.
That thought bore him up to the last on his death-bed. He always
spoke of your sister as his 'little darling.' He firmly believed
that she was waiting to forgive and console him in the other
world--and who shall say he was deceived in that belief?"
Not I! Not anyone who has ever loved and suffered, surely!
"It was out of the depths of his self-sacrificing love for the
child that he drew the fatal courage to undertake the operation,"
continued the priest. "Your father naturally shrank from
attempting it. His medical brethren whom he consulted all doubted
the propriety of taking any measures for the removal of the
tumor, in the particular condition and situation of it when they
were called in.
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