"Well, and mother," said Dahlia, checking her, "promise me. Put a
feather on my mouth; put a glass to my face, before you let them carry me
out. Will you? Rhoda promises. I have asked her."

"Oh! the ideas of this girl!" Mrs. Sumfit burst out. "And looking so, as
she says it. My love, you didn't mean to die?"

Dahlia soothed her, and sent her off.

"I am buried alive!" she said. "I feel it all--the stifling! the
hopeless cramp! Let us go and garden. Rhoda, have you got laudanum in
the house?"

Rhoda shook her head, too sick at heart to speak. They went into the
garden, which was Dahlia's healthfullest place. It seemed to her that
her dead mother talked to her there. That was not a figure of speech,
when she said she felt buried alive. She was in the state of sensational
delusion. There were times when she watched her own power of motion
curiously: curiously stretched out her hands, and touched things, and
moved them. The sight was convincing, but the shudder came again. In a
frame less robust the brain would have given way. It was the very
soundness of the brain which, when her blood was a simple tide of life in
her veins, and no vital force, had condemned her to see the wisdom and
the righteousness of the act of sacrifice committed by her, and had urged
her even up to the altar. Then the sudden throwing off of the mask by
that man to whom she had bound herself, and the reading of Edward's
letter of penitence and love, thwarted reason, but without blinding or
unsettling it. Passion grew dominant; yet against such deadly matters on
all sides had passion to strive, that, under a darkened sky, visibly
chained, bound down, and hopeless, she felt between-whiles veritably that