T THE doctor was sitting with Colonel Tempest on Di's return to the hotel, and Di perceived that her father, who was still in a very excited state, had been telling him about his sudden change of fortune.

The doctor courteously offered his congratulations, and on leaving made a pretext of inquiring after Di's health in order to see her alone.

"Colonel Tempest has been telling me of his unexpected access of wealth," he said. "In his present condition of nervous prostration, and tendency to cerebral excitement, the information should most certainly have been withheld from him. His brain is not in a state to bear the strain which such an event might have put upon it, has put upon it. Were such a thing to occur again in his enfeebled condition, I cannot answer for the consequences."

"It was absolutely unforeseen," said Di. "None of us had the remotest suspicion. He has been in the habit of reading his letters for the past month."

"They must be kept from him for the present," replied the doctor. "Let them be brought to you in future, and use your own discretion about showing them to him after you have read them yourself. Your father must be guarded from all agitation."

This was more easily said than done. Nothing could turn Colonel Tempest's shattered, restless mind from hopping like a grasshopper on that one subject for the remainder of the day. The bit of cork in his medicine, which at another time would have elicited a torrent of indignation, excited only a momentary attention. He talked without ceasing—hinted darkly at danger to John which that young man's creditable though tardy action had averted, alluded to passages in his own life which nothing would induce him to divulge, and then lighting on a sentimental vein, discoursed of a happy old age (the old age of fiction), in which he should see Archie's and Di's children playing in the gallery at Overleigh. And the old name——

Di had not realized, until her parent descanted upon the subject in a way that set her teeth on edge, how hideous, how vulgar, is the seamy side of pride of birth. When Colonel Tempest began to dwell on "the goodness and the grace that on his birth had smiled," shall we blame Di if she put on the clock half an hour, and rang for the nurse?

Things were not much better next morning. Di gave strict orders that all letters and telegrams should be brought to her room. Colonel Tempest fidgeted because he had not heard from the lawyer in whose hands John had placed the transfer of the property. The letter was in Di's pocket, but she dared not give it to him, for though it contained nothing to agitate him, she knew that the fact that she had opened it would raise a whirlwind.

"And Archie," said Colonel Tempest, querulously—"I ought to have heard from him too. If John told him the same day that he wrote to me, we ought to have heard from Archie this morning. I should have imagined that though Archie did not give his father a thought when he was poor, he might have thought him worthy of a little consideration now."

"If that is the motive you would have given him if he had written, it is just as well he has not," said Di; but she wondered at his silence nevertheless.

But she did not wonder long.

She left her father busily writing to an imaginary lawyer, for he had neither the name nor address of John's, and on the landing met a servant bringing a telegram to her room. She took it upstairs, and though it was addressed to her father, opened it. She had no apprehension of evil. The old are afraid of telegrams, but the young have made them common, and have worn out their prestige.

The telegram was from John, merely stating that Archie had been taken seriously ill.

Di's heart gave a leap of thankfulness that her father had been spared this further shock. But Archie. Seriously ill. She was indignant at John's vague statement. What did seriously ill mean? Why could not he say what was the matter? And how could she keep the fact of his illness from her father? Ought she to go at once to Archie? Seriously ill. How like a man to send a telegram of that kind! She would telegraph at once to John for particulars, and go or stay according as the doctor thought she could or could not safely leave her father. Di put on her walking things, and ran out to the post-office round the corner, where she despatched a peremptory telegram to John; and then, seeing there was no one else to advise her, hurried to the doctor's house close at hand. For a wonder he was in. For a greater still, his last patient walked out as she walked in. The doctor, with the quickness of his kind, saw the difficulty, and caught up his hat to come with her.

"You shall go to your brother if you can," was the only statement to which he would commit himself during the two minutes' walk in the rain; the two minutes which sealed Colonel Tempest's fate.

No one knew exactly how it happened. Perhaps the hall porter had gone to his dinner, and the little boy who took his place for half an hour brought up the telegram to the person to whom it was addressed. No one knew afterwards how it had happened. It did happen, that was all.

Colonel Tempest had the pink paper in his hand as the doctor and Di entered the room. He was laughing softly to himself.

"Archie is dead," he said, chuckling. "That is what John would like me to believe. But I know better. It is John that is dead. It is John who had to be snuffed out. Swayne said so, and he knew. And John says it's Archie, and he will write. Ha, ha! We know better, eh, doctor? eh, Di? John's dead. Eight and twenty years old he was; but he's dead at last. He won't write any more. He won't spend my money any more. He won't keep me out any more."

Colonel Tempest dropped on his knees. The only prayer he knew rose to his lips. "For what we are going to receive, the Lord make us truly thankful."

For an awful day and night the fierce flame of delirium leaped and fell, and ever leaped again. With set face Di stood hour after hour in the blast of the furnace, till doctor and nurse marvelled at her courage and endurance.

On the evening of the second day John came. He had written to tell Colonel Tempest of his coming, but the letter had not been opened.

The doctor, thinking he was Di's brother, brought him into the sick-room, too crowded with fearful images for his presence to be noticed by the sick man.

"John is dead," the high-pitched terrible voice was saying. "Blundering fools. First there was the railway, but Goodwin saved him; damn his officiousness. And then there was the fire. They nearly had him that time. How grey he looked! Burnt to ashes. Bandaged up to the eyes. But he got better. And then the carnival. They muffed it again. Oh, Lord, how slow they were! But"—the voice sank to a frightful whisper—"they got him in Paris. I don't know how they did it—it's a secret; but they trapped him at last."

Suddenly the glassy eyes looked with horrified momentary recognition at John.

"Risen from the dead," continued the voice. "I knew he would get up again. I always said he would; and he has. You can't kill John. There's no grave deep enough to hold him. Look at him with his head out now, and the earth upon his hair. We ought to have put a monument over him to keep him down. He's getting up. I tell you I did not do it. The grave's not big enough. Swayne dug it for him when he was a little boy—a little boy at school."

Di turned her colourless face to John, and smiled at him, as one on the rack might smile at a friend to show that the anguish is not unbearable. She felt no surprise at seeing him. She was past surprise. She had forgotten that she had ever doubted his love.

In silence he took the hand she held out towards him, and kept it in a strong gentle clasp that was more comfort than any words.

Hour after hour they watched and ministered together, and hour by hour the lamp of life flared grimly low and lower. And after he had told everything—everything, everything that he had concealed in life—after John and Di had heard, in awed compassion and forgiveness, every word of the guilty secret which he had kept under lock and key so many years, at last the tide of remembrance ebbed away and life with it.

Did he know them in the quiet hours that followed? Did he recognize them? They bent over him. They spoke to him gently, tenderly. Did he understand? They never knew.

And so, in the grey of an April morning, poor Colonel Tempest, unconscious of death, which had had so many terrors for him in life, drifted tranquilly upon its tide from the human compassion that watched by him here, to the Infinite Pity beyond.