But here on this wild night were only tumult and darkness; and if Nature in this aspect were still to be held, as Wordsworth makes her, the Voice and Apocalypse of God, she breathed a power pitiless and terrible to man. The fierce stream below, the tiny speck made by the carriage and horses straining against the hurricane of wind, the forests on the farther bank climbing to endless heights of rain, the flowers in the rock crannies lashed and torn, the gloom and chill which had thus blotted out a June evening: all these impressions were impressions of war, of struggle and attack, of forces unfriendly and overwhelming.

A certain restless and melancholy joy in the challenge of the storm, indeed, Ashe felt, as many another strong man has felt before him, in a similar emptiness of heart. But it was because of the mere provocation of physical energy which it involved; not, as it would have been with him in youth, because of the infinitude and vastness of nature, breathing power and expectation into man:

He flung the words upon the wind, which scattered them as soon as they were uttered, merely that he might give them a bitter denial, reject for himself, now and always, the temper they expressed. He had known it well, none better!—gone to bed, and risen up with it—the mere joy in the "mere living." It had seasoned everything, twined round everything, great and small—a day's trout-fishing or deer-stalking; a new book, a friend, a famous place; then politics, and the joys of power.

Gone! Here he was, hurrying back to England, to take perhaps in his still young hand the helm of her vast fortunes; and of all the old "expectation and desire," the old passion of hope, the old sense of the magic that lies in things unknown and ways untrodden, he seemed to himself now incapable. He would do his best, and without the political wrestle life would be too trifling to be borne; but the relish and the savor were gone, and all was gray.

Ah!—he remembered one or two storm-walks with Kitty in their engaged or early married days—in Scotland chiefly. As he trudged up this Swiss pass he could see stretches of Scotch heather under drifting mist, and feel a little figure in its tweed dress flung suddenly by the wind and its own soft will against his arm. And then, the sudden embrace, and the wet, fragrant cheek, and her Voice—mocking and sweet!

Oh, God! where was she now? The shock of her disappearance from Venice had left in some ways a deeper mark upon him than even the original catastrophe. For who that had known her could think of such a being, alone, in a world of strangers, without a peculiar dread and anguish? That she was alive he knew, for her five hundred a year—and she had never accepted another penny from him since her flight—was still drawn on her behalf by a banking firm in Paris. His solicitors, since the failure of their first efforts to trace her after Cliffe's death, had made repeated inquiries; Ashe had himself gone to Paris to see the bankers in question. But he was met by their solemn promise to Kitty to keep her secret inviolate. Madame d'Estrées supplied him with the name of the convent in which Kitty had been brought up; but the mother superior denied all knowledge of her. Meanwhile no course of action on Kitty's part could have restored her so effectually to her place in Ashe's imagination. She haunted his days and nights. So also did his memory of the Dean's petition. Insensibly, without argument, the whole attitude of his mind thereto had broken down; since he had been out of office, and his days and nights were no longer absorbed in the detail of administration and Parliamentary leadership, he had been the defenceless prey of grief; yearning and pity and agonized regret, rising from the deep subconscious self, had overpowered his first recoil and determination; and in the absence of all other passionate hope, the one desire and dream which still lived warm and throbbing at his heart was the dream that still in some crowd, or loneliness, he might again, before it was too late, see Kitty's face and the wildness of Kitty's eyes.

And he believed much the same process had taken place in his mother's feeling. She rarely spoke of Kitty; but when she did the doubt and soreness of her mind were plain. Her own life had grown very solitary. And in particular the old friendship between her and Polly Lyster had entirely ceased to be. Lady Tranmore shivered when she was named, and would never herself speak of her if she could help it. Ashe had tried in vain to make her explain herself. Surely it was incredible that she could in any way blame Mary for the incident at Verona? Ashe, of course, remembered the passage in his mother's letter from Venice, and they had the maid Blanche's report to Lady Tranmore, of Kitty's intentions when she left Venice, of her terror when Cliffe appeared—of her swoon. But he believed with the Dean that any treacherous servant could have brought about the catastrophe. Vincenzo, one of the gondoliers who took Kitty to the station, had seen the luggage labelled for Verona; no doubt Cliffe had bribed him; and this explanation was, indeed, suggested to Lady Tranmore by the maid. His mother's suspicion—if indeed she entertained it—was so hideous that Ashe, finding it impossible to make his own mind harbor it for an instant, was harrowed by the mere possibility of its existence; as though it represented some hidden sore of consciousness that refused either to be probed or healed.

As he labored on against the storm all thought of his present life and activities dropped away from him; he lived entirely in the past. "What is it in me," he thought, "that has made the difference between my life and that of other men I know—that weakened me so with Kitty?" He canvassed his own character, as a third person might have done.

The Christian, no doubt, would say that his married life had failed because God had been absent from it, because there had been in it no consciousness of higher law, of compelling grace.

Ashe pondered what such things might mean. "The Christian—in speculative belief—fails under the challenge of life as often as other men. Surely it depends on something infinitely more primitive and fundamental than Christianity?—something out of which Christianity itself springs? But this something—does it really exist—or am I only cheating myself by fancying it? Is it, as all the sages have said, the pursuit of some eternal good, the identification of the self with it—the 'dying to live'? And is this the real meaning at the heart of Christianity?—at the heart of all religion?—the everlasting meaning, let science play what havoc it please with outward forms and statements?"

Had he, perhaps, doubted the soul?

He groaned aloud. "O my God, what matter that I should grow wise—if Kitty is lost and desolate?"

And he trampled on his own thoughts—feeling them a mere hypocrisy and offence.

As they left the Gondo ravine and began to climb the zigzag road to the Simplon inn, the storm grew still wilder, and the driver, with set lips and dripping face, urged his patient beasts against a deluge. The road ran rivers; each torrent, carefully channelled, that passed beneath it brought down wood and soil in choking abundance; and Ashe watched the downward push of the rain on the high, exposed banks above the carriage. Once they passed a fragment of road which had been washed away; the driver pointing to it said something sulkily about "frane" on the "other side."

This bad moment, however, proved to be the last and worst, and when they emerged upon the high valley in which stands the village of Simplon, the rain was already lessening and the clouds rolling up the great sides and peaks of the Fletschhorn. Ashe promised himself a comparatively fine evening and a rapid run down to Brieg.

Outside the old Simplon posting-house, however, they presently came upon a crowd of vehicles of every description, of which the drivers were standing in groups with dripping rugs across their shoulders—shouting and gesticulating.

And as they drove up the news was thundered at them in every possible tongue. Between the hospice and Bérizal two hundred metres of road had been completely washed away. The afternoon diligence had just got through by a miracle an hour before the accident occurred; before anything else could pass it would take at least ten or twelve hours' hard work, through the night, before the laborers now being requisitioned by the commune could possibly provide even a temporary passage.

Ashe in despair went into the inn to speak with the landlord, and found that unless he was prepared to abandon books and papers, and make a push for it over mountain paths covered deep in fresh snow, there was no possible escape from the dilemma. He must stay the night. The navvies were already on their way; and as soon as ever the road was passable he should know. For not even a future Prime Minister of England could Herr Ludwig do more.

He and Dell went gloomily up the narrow stone stairs of the inn to look at the bedrooms, which were low-roofed and primitive, penetrated everywhere by the roar of a stream which came down close behind the inn. Through the open door of one of the rooms Ashe saw the foaming mass, framed as it were in a window, and almost in the house.

He chose two small rooms looking on the street, and bade Dell get a fire lit in one of them, a bed moved out, an arm-chair moved in, and as large a table set for him as the inn could provide, while he took a stroll before dinner. He had some important letters to answer, and he pointed out to Dell the bag which contained them.

Then he stepped out into the muddy street, which was still a confusion of horses, vehicles, and men, and, turning up a path behind the inn, was soon in solitude. An evening of splendor! Nature was still in a tragic, declamatory mood—sending piled thunder-clouds of dazzling white across a sky extravagantly blue, and throwing on the high snow-fields and craggy tops a fierce, flame-colored light. The valley was resonant with angry sound, and the village, now in shadow, with its slender, crumbling campanile, seemed like a cowering thing over which the eagle has passed.

The grandeur and the freshness, the free, elemental play of stream and sky and mountain, seized upon a man in whom the main impulses of life were already weary, and filled him with an involuntary physical delight. He noticed the flowers at his feet, in the drenched grass which was already lifting up its battered stalks, and along the margins of the streams—deep blue colombines, white lilies, and yellow anemones. Incomparable beauty lived and breathed in each foot of pasture; and when he raised his eyes from the grass they fed on visionary splendors of snow and rock, stretching into the heavens.

No life visible—except a line of homing cattle, led by a little girl with tucked-up skirt and bare feet. And—in the distance—the slender figure of a woman walking—stopping often to gather a flower—or to rest? Not a woman of the valley, clearly. No doubt a traveller, weather-bound like himself at the inn. He watched the figure a little, for some vague grace of movement that seemed to enter into and make a part of that high beauty in which the scene was steeped; but it disappeared behind a fold of pasture, and he did not see it again.

In spite of the multitude of vehicles gathered about the inn there were not so many guests in the salle-à-manger, when Ashe entered it, as he had expected. He supposed that a majority of these vehicles must be return carriages from Brieg. Still there was much clatter of talk and plates, and German seemed to be the prevailing tongue. Except for a couple whom Ashe took to be a Genevese professor and his wife, there was no lady in the room.

He lingered somewhat late at table, toying with his orange, and reading a Journal de Genève, captured from a neighbor, which contained an excellent "London letter." The room emptied. The two Swiss handmaidens came in to clear away soiled linen and arrange the tables for the morning's coffee. Only, at a farther table, a couvert for one person, set by itself, remained still untouched.

He happened to be alone in the room when the door again opened and a lady entered. She did not see him behind his newspaper, and she walked languidly to the farther table and sat down. As she did so she was seized with a fit of coughing, and when it was over she leaned her head on her hands, gasping.

Ashe had half risen—the newspaper was crushed in his hand—when the Swiss waitress whom the men of the inn called Fräulein Anna—who was, indeed, the daughter of the landlord—came back.

"How are you, madame?" she said, with a smile, and in a slow English of which she was evidently proud.

"I'm better to-day," said the other, hastily. "I shall start to-morrow. What a noise there is to-night!" she added, in a tone both fretful and weary.

"We are so full—it is the accident to the road, madame. Will madame have a thé complet as before?"

The lady nodded, and Frãulein Anna, who evidently knew her ways, brought in the tea at once, stayed chatting beside her for a minute, and then departed, with a long, disapproving look at the gentleman in the corner who was so long over his coffee and would not let her clear away.

Ashe made a fierce effort to still the thumping in his breast and decide what he should do. For the guests there was only one door of entrance or exit, and to reach it he must pass close beside the new-comer.

He laid down his newspaper. She heard the rustling, and involuntarily looked round.

There was a slight sound—an exclamation. She rose. He heard and saw her coming, and sat tranced and motionless, his eyes bent upon her. She came tottering, clinging to the chairs, her hand on her side, till she reached the corner where he was.

"William!" she said, with a little, glad sob, under her breath—"William!"

He himself could not speak. He stood there gazing at her, his lips moving without sound. It seemed to him that she turned her head a moment, as though to look for some one beside him—with an exquisite tremor of the mouth.

"Isn't it strange?" she said, in the same guarded voice. "I had a dream once—a valley—and mountains—and an inn. You sat here—just like this—and—"

She put up her hands to her eyes a moment, shivered, and withdrew them. From her expression she seemed to be waiting for him to speak. He moved and stood beside her.

"Where can we talk?" he said, with difficulty. She shook her head vaguely, looking round her with that slight frown, complaining and yet sweet, which was like a touch of fire on memory.

The waitress came back into the room.

"It is odd to have met you here!" said Kitty, in a laughing voice. "Let us go into the salon de lecture. The maids want to clear away. Please bring your newspaper."

Fräulein Anna looked at them with a momentary curiosity, and went on with her work. They passed into the passage-way outside, which was full of smokers overflowing from the crowded room beyond, where the humbler frequenters of the inn ate and drank.

Kitty glanced round her in bewilderment. "The salon de lecture will be full, too. Where shall we go?" she said, looking up.

Ashe's hand clinched as it hung beside him. The old gesture—and the drawn, emaciated face—they pierced the heart.

"I told my servant to arrange me a sitting-room up-stairs," he said, hurriedly, in her ear. "Will you go up first?—number ten."

She nodded, and began slowly to mount the stairs, coughing as she went. The man whom Ashe had taken for a Genevese professor looked after her, glanced at his neighbor, and shrugged his shoulders. "Phthisique," he said, with a note of pity. The other nodded. "Et d'un type très avancé!"

They moved towards the door and stood looking into the night, which was dark with intermittent rain. Ashe studied a map of the commune which hung on the wall beside him, till at a moment when the passage had become comparatively clear he turned and went up-stairs.

The door of his improvised salon was ajar. Beyond it his valet was coming out of his bedroom with wet clothes over his arm. Ashe hesitated. But the man had been with him through the greater part of his married life, and was a good heart. He beckoned him back into the room he was leaving, and the two stepped inside.

"Dell, my good fellow, I want your help. I have just met my wife here—Lady Kitty. You understand. Neither of us, of course, had any idea. Lady Kitty is very ill. We wish to have a conversation—uninterrupted. I trust you to keep guard."

The young man, son of one of the Haggart gardeners, started and flushed, then gave his master a look of sympathy.

"I'll do my best, sir."

Ashe nodded and went back to the next room. He closed the door behind him. Kitty, who was sitting by the fire, half rose. Their eyes met. Then with a stifled cry he flung himself down, kneeling beside her, and she sank into his arms. His tears fell on her face, anguish and pity overwhelmed him.

"You may!" she said, brokenly, putting up her hand to his cheek, and kissing him—"you may! I'm not mad or wicked now—and I'm dying!"

Agonized murmurs of love, pardon, self-abasement passed between them. It was as though a great stream bore them on its breast; an awful and majestic power enwrapped them, and made each word, each kiss, wonderful, sacramental. He drew himself away at last, holding her hair back from her brow and temples, studying her features, his own face convulsed.

"Where have you been? Why did you hide from me?"

"You forbade me," she said, stroking his hair. "And it was quite right. The dear Dean told me—and I quite understood. If I'd gone to Haggart then there'd have been more trouble. I should have tried to get my old place back. And now it's all over. You can give me all I want, because I can't live. It's only a question of months, perhaps weeks. Nobody could blame you, could they? People don't laugh when—it's death. It simplifies things so—doesn't it?"

She smiled, and nestled to him again.

"What do you mean?" he said, almost violently. "Why are you so ill?"

"It was Bosnia first, and then—being miserable—I suppose. And Poitiers was very cold—and the nuns very stuffy, bless them—they wouldn't let me have air enough."

He groaned aloud while he remembered his winter in London, in the forlorn luxury of the Park Lane house.

"Where have you been?" he repeated.

"Oh! I went to the Soeurs Blanches—you remember?—where I used to be. You went there, didn't you?"—he made a sign of miserable assent—"but I made them promise not to tell! There was an old mistress of novices there still who used to be very fond of me. She got one of the houses of the Sacré Coeur to take me in—at Poitiers. They thought they were gathering a stray sheep back into the fold, you understand, as I was brought up a Catholic—of sorts. And I didn't mind!" The familiar intonation, soft, complacent, humorous, rose like a ghost between them. "I used to like going to mass. But this Easter they wanted to make me 'go to my duties'—you know what it means?—and I wouldn't. I wanted to confess." She shuddered and drew his face down to hers again—"but only once—to—you—and then, well then, to die, and have done with it. You see, I knew one can't get on long with three-quarters of a lung. And they were rather tiresome—they didn't understand. So three weeks ago I drew some money out and said good-bye to them. Oh! they were very kind, and very sorry for me. They wanted me to take a maid, and I meant to. But the one they found wouldn't come with me when she saw how ill I was—and it all lingered on—so one day I just walked out to the railway-station and went to Paris. But Paris was rainy—and I felt I must see the sun again. So I stayed two nights at a little hotel maman used to go to—horrid place!—and each night I read your speeches in the reading-room—and then I got my things from Poitiers, and started—"

A fit of coughing stopped her, coughing so terrible and destructive that he almost rushed for help. But she restrained him. She made him understand that she wanted certain remedies from her own room across the corridor. He went for them. The door of this room had been shut by the observant Dell, who was watching the passage from his own bedroom farther on. When Ashe had opened it he found himself face to face as it were with the foaming stream outside. The window, as he had seen it before, was wide open to the water-fall just beyond it, and the temperature was piercingly cold and damp. The furniture was of the roughest, and a few of Kitty's clothes lay scattered about. As he fumbled for a light, there hovered before his eyes the remembrance of their room in Hill Street, strewn with chiffons and all the elegant and costly trifles that made the natural setting of its mistress.

He found the medicines and hurried back. She feebly gave him directions. "Now the strychnine!—and some brandy."

He did all he could. He drew some chairs together before the fire, and made a couch for her with pillows and rugs. She thanked him with smiles, and her eyes followed his every movement.

"Tell your man to get some milk! And listen"—she caught his hand. "Lock my door. That nice woman down-stairs will come to look after me, and she'll think I'm asleep."

It was done as she wished. Ashe took in the milk from Dell's hands, and a fresh supply of wood. Then he turned the key in his own door and came back to her. She was lying quiet, and seemed revived.

"How cosey!" she said, with a childish pleasure, looking round her at the bare white walls and scoured boards warmed with the fire-light. The bitter tears swam in Ashe's eyes. He fell into a chair on the other side of the fire, and stared—seeing nothing—at the burning logs.

"You needn't suppose that I don't get people to look after me!" she went on, smiling at him again, one shadowy hand propping her cheek. And she prattled on about the kindness of the chambermaids at Vevey and Brieg, and how one of them had wanted to come with her as her maid. "Oh! I shall find one at Florence if I get there—or a nurse. But just for these few days I wanted to be free! In the winter there were so many people about—so many eyes! I just pined to cheat them—get quit of them. A maid would have bothered me to stay in bed and see doctors—and you know, William, with this illness of mine you're so restless!"

"Where were you going to?" he said, without looking up.

"Oh! to Italy somewhere—just to see some flowers again—and the sun. Only not to Venice!"

There was a silence, which she broke by a sudden cry as she drew him down to her.

"William! you know—I was coming home to you, when that man—found me."

"I know. If it had only been I who killed him!"

"I'm just—Kitty!" she said, choking—"as bad as bad can be. But I couldn't have done what Mary Lyster did."

"Kitty—for God's sake!"

"Oh, I know it," she said, almost with triumph—"now I know it. I determined to know—and I got people in Venice to find out. She sent the message—that told him where I was—and I know the man who took it. I suppose it would be pathetic if I sent her word that I had forgiven her. But I haven't!"

Ashe cried out that it was wholly and utterly inconceivable.

"HE DREW SOME CHAIRS TOGETHER BEFORE THE FIRE"

"Oh no!—she hated me because I had robbed her of Geoffrey. I had killed her life, I suppose—she killed mine. It was what I deserved, of course; only just at that moment—If there is a God, William, how could He have let it happen so?"

The tears choked her. He left his seat, and, kneeling beside her, he raised her in his arms, while she murmured broken and anguished confessions.

"I was so weak—and frightened. And he said, it was no good trying to go back to you. Everybody knew I had gone to Verona—and he had followed me—No one would ever believe—And he wouldn't go—wouldn't leave me. It would be mere cruelty and desertion, he said. My real life was—with him. And I seemed—paralyzed. Who had sent that message? It never occurred to me—I felt as if some demon held me—and I couldn't escape—"

And again the sighs and tears, which wrung his heart—with which his own mingled. He tried to comfort her; but what comfort could there be? They had been the victims of a crime as hideous as any murder; and yet—behind the crime—there stretched back into the past the preparations and antecedents by which they themselves, alack, had contributed to their own undoing. Had they not both trifled with the mysterious test of life—he no less than she? And out of the dark had come the axe-stroke that ends weakness, and crushes the unsteeled, inconstant will.

After long silence, she began to talk in a rambling, delirious way of her months in Bosnia. She spoke of the cold—of the high mountain loneliness—of the terrible sights she had seen—till he drew her, shuddering, closer into his arms. And yet there was that in her talk which amazed him; flashes of insight, of profound and passionate experience, which seemed to fashion her anew before his eyes. The hard peasant life, in contact with the soil and natural forces; the elemental facts of birth and motherhood, of daily toil and suffering; what it means to fight oppressors for freedom, and see your dearest—son, lover, wife, betrothed—die horribly amid the clash of arms; into this caldron of human fate had Kitty plunged her light soul; and in some ways Ashe scarcely knew her again.

She recurred often to the story of a youth, handsome and beardless, who had been wounded by a stray Turkish shot in the course of the long climb to the village where she nursed. He had managed to gain the height, and then, killed by the march as much as by the shot, he had sunk down to die on the ground-floor of the house where Kitty lived.

"He was a stranger—no one knew him in the village—no one cared. They had their own griefs. I dressed his wound—and gave him water. He thought I was his mother, and asked me to kiss him. I kissed him, William—and he smiled once—before the last hemorrhage. If you had seen the cold, dismal room—and his poor face!"

Ashe gathered her to his breast. And after a while she said, with closed eyes:

"Oh, what pain there is in the world, William!—what pain! That's what—I never knew."

The evening wore on. All the noises ceased down-stairs. One by one the guests came up the stone stairs and along the creaking corridor. Boots were thrown out; the doors closed. The strokes of eleven o'clock rang out from the village campanile; and amid the quiet of the now drizzling rain the echoes of the bell lingered on the ear. Last of all a woman's step passed the door—stopped at the door of Kitty's room, as though some one listened, and then gently returned. "Fräulein Anna!" said Kitty—"she's a good soul."

Soon nothing was heard but the roar of the flooded stream on one side of the old narrow building and the dripping of rain on the other. Their low voices were amply covered by these sounds. The night lay before them, safe and undisturbed. Candles burned on the mantel-piece, and on a table behind Kitty's head was a paraffine lamp. She seemed to have a craving for light.

"Kitty!" said Ashe, suddenly bending over her—"understand! I shall never leave you again."

She started, her head fell back on his arm, and her brown eyes considered him:

"William! I saw the Standard at Geneva. Aren't you going home—because of politics?"

"A few telegrams will settle that. I shall take you to Geneva to-morrow. We shall get doctors there."

A little smile played about her mouth—a smile which did not seem to have any reference to his words or to her next question.

"Nobody thinks of the book now, do they, William?"

"No, Kitty, no! It's all forgotten, dear."

"Oh, it was abominable!" She drew a long breath. "But I can't help it—I did get a horrid pleasure out of writing it—till Venice—till you left off loving me. Oh, William! William!—what a good thing it is I'm dying!"

"Hush, Kitty—hush."

"It gives one such an unfair advantage, though, doesn't it? You can't ever be angry with me again. There won't be time. William, dear!—I haven't had a brain like other people. I know it. It's only since I've been so ill—that I've been sane! It's a strange feeling—as though one had been bled—and some poison had drained away. But it would never do for me to take a turn and live! Oh no!—people like me are better safely under the grass. Oh, my beloved! my beloved! I just want to say that all the time, and nothing else—I've hungered so to say it!"

He answered her with all the anguish, all the passionate, fruitless tenderness and vain comfortings that rise from the human heart in such a strait. But when he asked her pardon for his hardness towards the Dean's petition, when he said that his conscience had tormented him thenceforward, she would scarcely hear a word.

"You did quite right," she said, peremptorily—"quite right."

Then she raised herself on her arm and looked at him.

"William!" she said, with a strange, kindled expression. "I—I don't think I can live any more! I think—I'm dying—here—now!"

She fell back on her pillows, and he sprang to his feet, crying that he must go for Fräulein Anna and a doctor. But she held him feebly, motioning towards the brandy and strychnine. "That's all—you can do."

He gave them to her, and again she revived and smiled at him.

"Don't be frightened. It was a sudden feeling—it came over me—that this dear little room—and your arms—would be the end. Oh, how much best! There!—that was foolish!—I'm better. It isn't only the lungs, you see; they say the heart's worst. I nearly went at Vevey, one night. It was such a long faint."

Then she lay quiet, with her hand in his, in a dreamy, peaceful state, and his panic subsided. Once she sent messages to Lady Tranmore—messages full of sorrow, touched also—by a word here, a look there—by the charm of the old Kitty.

"I don't deserve to die like this," she said, once, with a half-impatient gesture. "Nothing can prevent it's being beautiful—and touching—you know; our meeting like this—and your goodness to me. Oh, I'm glad! But I don't want to glorify—what I've done. Shame! Shame!"

And again her face contracted with the old habitual agony, only to be soothed away gradually by his tone and presence, the spending of his whole being in the broken words of love.

Towards the morning, when, as it seemed to him, she had been sleeping for a time, and he had been, if not sleeping, at least dreaming awake beside her, he heard a little, low laugh, and looked round. Her brown eyes were wide open, till they seemed to fill the small, blighted face; and they were fixed on an empty chair the other side of the fire.

"It's so strange—in this illness," she whispered—"that it makes one dream—and generally kind dreams. It's fever—but it's nice." She turned and looked at him. "Harry was there, William—sitting in that chair. Not a baby any more—but a little fellow—and so lively, and strong, and quick. I had you both—both."

Looking back afterwards, also, he remembered that she spoke several times of religious hopes and beliefs—especially of the hope in another life—and that they seemed to sustain her. Most keenly did he recollect the delicacy with which she had refrained from asking his opinion upon them, lest it should trouble him not to be able to uphold or agree with her; while, at the same time, she wished him to have the comfort of remembering that she had drawn strength and calm, in these last hours, from religious thoughts.

For they proved, indeed, to be the last hours. About three the morning began to dawn, clear and rosy, with rich lights striking on the snow. Suddenly Kitty sat up, disengaged herself from her wraps, and tottered to her feet.

"I'll go back to my room," she said, in bewilderment. "I'd rather."

And as she clung to him, with a startled yet half-considering look, she gazed round her, at the bright fire, the morning light, the chair from which he had risen—his face.

He tried to dissuade her. But she would go. Her aspect, however, was deathlike, and as he softly undid the doors, and half-helped, half-carried her across the passage, he said to her that he must go and waken Fräulein Anna and find a doctor.

"No—no." She grasped him with all her remaining strength; "stay with me."

They entered the little room, which seemed to be in a glory of light, for the sun striking across the low roof of the inn had caught the foamy water-fall beyond, and the reflection of it on the white walls and ceiling was dazzling.

Beside the bed she swayed and nearly fell.

"I won't undress," she murmured—"I'll just lie down."

She lay down with his help, turning her face to make a fond, hardly articulate sound, and press her cheek against his. In a few minutes it seemed to him that she was sleeping again. He softly went out of the room and down-stairs. There, early as it was, he found Fräulein Anna, who looked at him with amazement.

"Where can I find a doctor?" he asked her; and they talked for a few minutes, after which she went up-stairs beside him, trembling and flushed.

They found Kitty lying on her side, her face hidden entirely in the curls which had fallen across it, and one arm hanging. There was that in her aspect which made them both recoil. Then Ashe rushed to her with a cry, and as he passionately kissed her cold cheek he heard the clamor of the frightened girl behind him. "Ach, Gott!—Ach Gott!"—and the voices of others, men and women, who began to crowd into the narrow room.

THE END