HOW GRANNY MARRABLE THOUGHT SHE OUGHT NOT TO GO TO SLEEP, BUT DID. HOW A CRICKET WAS STILL AT IT, WHEN SHE WAKED. HOW MAISIE WAKED TOO. HOW THEY REMEMBERED THINGS TOGETHER, IN THE NIGHT. A SKULL TWENTY-SEVEN INCHES ROUND. HOW PHOEBE COULD NOT FORGIVE HER BROTHER-IN-LAW, GOD OR NO! HOW IT HAD ALL BEEN MAISIE'S FAULT. THE OTHER LETTER, IN THE WORKBOX, BEHIND THE SCISSORS. THE STORY OF THE SCORPION. ALL TRUE! ONLY IT WAS MRS. STENNIS, WHO DIED IN AGONY. ELIZABETH-NEXT-DOOR'S IMMOVABLE HUSBAND. HOW GRANNY MARRABLE WAS RELIEVED ABOUT THAT SCORPION. HOW MAISIE'S HUSBAND HAD REALLY HAD A DEVIL—A BLACK MAN'S—WHICH MAISIE'S SON HAD INHERITED. A NEW INFECTION IN THINE EYE. HOW RUTH WENT FOR THE DOCTOR. HOW HE RECOMMENDED GWEN, AS WELL AS THE MIXTURE

The two old twins knew it all now, so far as it would ever be a matter of knowledge. They had got at the heart of each other's identity, before either really understood the cruel machination that had cancelled the life of either for the other.

Ruth Thrale left them alone together, and went back to force herself to eat. Keziah wanted to get back to her old man, and how could she go, unless Ruth kept in trim to attend to her two charges? Who could say that old Phoebe, at eighty, would not give in under the strain? Ruth had always a happy faculty of self-forgetfulness; and now, badly as she had felt the shock, she so completely lost sight of herself in the thought of the greater trouble of the principal actors, as to be fully alive to the one great need ahead, that of guarding and preserving what was left of the old life, the tending of which had come so strangely upon her. She refused Keziah's offer to remain on. Elizabeth-next-door, she said, was always at hand for emergencies.

Keziah stayed late enough to see all arranged for the night, ending with a more or less successful effort to get old Maisie to swallow arrowroot. She helped Ruth to establish the Granny in her own high-backed chair beside her sister—for neither would relinquish the other's hand—and took advantage of a very late return of Brantock, the carrier, to convey her home, where she arrived after midnight.

All know the feeling that surely must have been that of at least one of the old sisters, that sleep ought to be for some mysterious reason combated, or nonsuited rather, when the mind is at odds with grave events. One rises rebellious against its power, when it steals a march on wakefulness, catching the keenest vigilance unawares. There was no reason why Granny Marrable should not sleep in her own arm-chair—which she would say was every bit as good as bed, and used accordingly—except that yielding meant surrender of the faculties to unconsciousness of a problem not yet understood, with the sickening prospect of finding it unanswered on awakening. That seemed to be reason enough for many resentful recoils from the very portals of sleep; serving no end, as Maisie had been overcome without a contest, and lay still as an effigy on a tomb. A vague fear that she might die unwatched, looking so like Death already, may have touched Phoebe's mind. But fears and unsolved riddles alike melted away and vanished in the end; and when Ruth Thrale, an hour later, starting restless from her own couch near by, looked in to satisfy herself that all was well, both might have been leagues away in a dream-world, for any consciousness they showed of her presence.

That was on the stroke of one; and for two full hours after all was silence, but for the records of the clock at its intervals, and the cricket dwelling on the same theme our forefathers heard and gave no heed to, a thousand years ago. Then old Phoebe woke to wonder, for a blank moment, what had happened that she should be sitting there alone, with the lazy flicker of a charred faggot helping out a dim, industrious rushlight in a shade. But only till she saw that she was not alone. It all came back then. The figure on the bed!—not dead, surely?

No—for the hand she held was warm enough to reassure her. It had been the terror of a moment, that this changed creature, with memories that none but Maisie could have known, had flashed into her life to vanish from it, and leave her bewildered, almost without a word of that inexplicable past. Only of a moment, for the hand she held tightened on hers, and the still face that was, and was not, her dead sister's turned to her, looked at her open-eyed, and spoke.

"I think I am not dreaming now, but I was.... I was dreaming of Phoebe, years ago.... But you are Phoebe. Say that I am Maisie, that I may hear you. Say it!"

"Oh, my darling!—I know you are Maisie. But it is so hard to know."

"Yes—it is all so hard to know—so hard to think! But I know it is true.... Oh, Phoebe, where do you think I was but now, in my dream?... Yes, where?—What place?... Guess!"

"I cannot tell ... back in the old time?"

"Back in the old time—back in the old place. I was shelling peas to help old Keturah—old Keturah that had had three husbands, and her old husband then was the sexton, and he had buried them all three! We were there, under her porch ... with the honeysuckle all in flower—and, oh, the smell of it in the heat!—it was all there in my dream! And you were there. Oh, Phoebe darling, how beautiful you were! We were seventeen."

"Ah, my dear, I know when that was. 'Twas the day they came—came first. Oh, God be good to us!"

"Oh, Phoebe dear, why be so heartbroken? It was a merry time. Thank God for it with me, darling!... Ay, I know—all over now!..."

"I mind it well, dear. They came up on their horses."

"Thornton and Ralph. And made a pretext they would like to see inside the Church. Because old Keturah had the key."

"But 'twas an untruth! Little care they had for inside the Church! 'Twas ourselves, and they knew it."

"Oh, Phoebe!—but we knew it too! I had no chance to dream how we showed them the Church and the crypt, for I woke up. Ah, but 'tis long ago now!—sixty-two—sixty-three years! I wonder, is the stack of bones in the crypt now that was then? There was a big skull that measured twenty-seven inches."

"That it was! Twenty-seven. Now, to think of us young creatures handling those old bones!"

"Then it was not long but they came again on their horses, and this time it was that their father the Squire would see father righted in his lawsuit about the upper waters of the millstream. That was how Thornton made a friend of father. And then it was we played them our trick, to say which was which. We changed our frocks, and they were none the wiser."

A recollection stirred in old Phoebe's mind, that could almost bring a smile to her lips, even now. "Ralph never was any the wiser. He went away to the Indies, and died there.... But not afore he told to my husband how Thornton came to tell us apart.... How did he? Why, darling, 'twas the way you would give him all your hand, and I stinted him of mine."

"You never loved him, Phoebe."

"Was I not in the right of it, Maisie?" She then felt the words were hasty, and would have been glad to recall them. She waited for an answer, but none came. The fire was all but out, and the morning chill was in the air. She rose from the bedside and crossed the room to help it from extinction. But she felt very shaky on her feet.

A little rearrangement convinced the fire that it had been premature; and an outlying faggot, brought into hotchpot, decided as an after-thought that it could flare. "I am coming back," said Granny Marrable. She was afraid her sister would think she was going to be left alone. But there was no need, for when she reached her chair again—and she was glad to do so—old Maisie was just as she had left her, quite tranquil and seeming collected, but with her eyes open, watching the welcome light of the new flicker. One strange thing in this interview was that her weakness seemed better able to endure the strain of the position than her sister's strength.

She picked up the thread of the conversation where that interlude of the fire had left it. "You never loved Thornton, Phoebe dearest. But he was mine, for my love. He was kind and good to me, all those days out there in the bush, till I lost him. He was a lawbreaker, I know, but he paid his penalty. And was I not to forgive, when I loved him? God forgives, Phoebe." Half of what she had come to know had slipped away from her already; and, though she was accepting her sister as a living reality, the forged letter, the cause of all, was forgotten.

Granny Marrable, on the contrary, kept in all her bewilderment a firm hold on the wickedness of Daverill the father. It was he that had done it all, and no other. Conceivably, her having set eyes on Daverill the son had made this hold the firmer. To her the name meant treachery and cruelty. Even in this worst plight of a mind in Chaos, she could not bear to see the rugged edges of a truth trimmed off, to soften judgment of a wicked deed. But had she been at her best, she might have borne it this time to spare her sister the pain of sharing her knowledge, if such ignorance was possible. As it was, she could not help saying:—"God forgives, Maisie, and I would have forgiven, if I could have had you back when he was past the need of you. Oh, to think of the long years we might still have had, but for his deception!"

"My dear, it may be you are right. But all my head is gone for thinking. You are there, and that is all I know. How could I?... What is it all?"

The despair in her voice did not unnerve her sister more. Rather, if anything, it strengthened her, as did anything that drew her own mind out of itself to think only of her fellow-sufferer. She could but answer, hesitatingly:—"My dear, was I not here all the while you thought me dead?... If you had known ... oh, if you had known!... you might have come." She could not keep back the sound of her despair in her own voice.

Maisie started spasmodically from her pillow.

"Oh, God have mercy on me! Save me, Phoebe, save me!" she cried. She clung with both hands to her sister, and gasped for breath. Then the paroxysm of her excitement passed, and she sank back, whispering aloud in broken speech:—"I mean ... it came back to me ... the tale ... the letter.... Oh, but it cannot be true!... Tell it me again—tell me what you know."

Phoebe's response flagged. What could her old brain be said to know, yet, in such a whirl? "I'll try, my dear, to say it out right, for you to hear. But 'tis a hard thing to know, and 'tis hard to have to know it. Dr. Nash said it to me, that it was Thornton, your husband. And our young lady of the Towers—she, my dear, you know, that is Lady Gwendolen Rivers—said it to me again." Old Maisie clung closer to the hand she held, and trembled so that Phoebe stopped, saying:—"Ought I to tell?"

"Yes—go on! You know, dear, I know it all—half know it—but I cannot hold it for long—it goes. Go on!"

"He wrote to me—he wrote to you—saying, we were dead. O God, forgive him for his cruelty! Why, oh why?" She fixed her eyes on her sister, and seemed to wait for an answer to the question.

And yet she wondered in her heart when the answer came. It came with a light that broke through the speaker's face, a sound of relief in her words:—"It was his love for me, Phoebe dearest—it was his love for me! He would not have me go from him to my sister in England, even for the time I would have wanted, to see her again. The fault was mine, dear, the fault was mine! I was ever on at him—plaguing—plaguing him to spare me for the time. Oh—'twas I that did it!"

Let her believe it! Let her see a merit in it for the man she loved! That was Phoebe's thought.

"He was always good to me," Maisie continued. "He never thought of what might come of it. All his desire was I should not leave him. Oh, Phoebe, Phoebe, if only I might have died there and then, out in the Colony!"

"To see me no more? Not this once? I thank God that has spared ye to me, Maisie, just but to hear your voice and hold your hand and kiss your face. If I be dreaming, I be dreaming. Only I would not wake, not I. But I can scarce bear myself for the wonderment of it all. How could you come back alone—my Maisie, alone and old!—back again to England—in a ship—through the storms?" For all the mind that Granny Marrable had left after the bewildering shock was aching to know more.

Old Maisie was almost too weak for anything like curiosity about the past; she simply submitted—acquiesced. This was her sister, not dead by some miracle. When in dreams we see again the departed, do we speak of the interim? Surely never? Neither did Maisie. She could not even look forward to knowing more. She could talk on, with no difficulty of speech—indeed, seemed talkative. She could reply now to Phoebe's question:—"But, my dear, I was not alone, nor old. I was not much older than my Ruth that I have found.... Where is she?—she is not gone?" She looked round, frightened, trying to raise herself.

"She is gone away to sleep. It is night, you know. There goes the clock. Four. She will come again.... But, oh, Maisie, was it as long ago as that? 'Tis but a very little while back Ruth turned fifty."

"Is my girl turned of fifty, then?—yes! it must be so. Fifty years past I landed ashore in Hobart Town, and it was a babe of four I had to leave behind. Well—I was a bit older. I was fifty-seven when I lost my son." This seemed to mean the death of some son unknown to Granny Marrable. The convict was never farther from her mind. "'Tis twenty-five years I have been in England—all of twenty-five years, Phoebe."

"Oh, God have pity on us all! Twenty-five years!" It was a cry of pain turned into words. Had she had to say what stung her most, she would probably have said the thought that Maisie might have seen her daughter's wedding, or at least the babyhood of her children. So much there was to tell!—would she live to hear it? And so much to hear!—would she live to tell it? She could not understand her sister's words that followed:—"All of twenty years alone," referring to the period since her son's transportation. It was really longer. But memory of figures is insecure in hours of trial.

Maisie continued:—"When I came back, I went straight to our old home, long ago—to Darenth Mill, to hear what I might, and old Keturah was dead, and her husband was dead, and ne'er a soul knew aught to tell me. And there was father's grave in the churchyard, and no other. So what could I think but what the letter said, that all were drowned in the cruel sea, your husband Nicholas, and my little one, all three?"

"And the letter said that—the letter he made up?"

"The letter said that, and I read it. It had black seals, and I broke them and read it. And it was from father, and said you were drowned ... drowned ... Yes!—Phoebe drowned ... and my little Ruth, and ... Oh, Phoebe, how can this be you?" The panic came again in her voice, and again she clutched spasmodically at the hand she held. But it passed, leaving her only able to speak faintly. "I kept it in my table-drawer.... It must be there still." She had only half got the truth.

Granny Marrable tried to make it clear, so far as she could. "You forget, dear. Her ladyship has the letter, and Dr. Nash knows. Lady Gwendolen who brought you here...."

It was a happy reference. A light broke over the old face on the pillow, and there was ease in the voice that said:—"She is one of God's Angels. I knew it by her golden hair. When will she come?"

"Very soon. To-morrow, perhaps. 'Twas her ladyship told you—was it not? Oh, you remember?"

"My dear, she told it me like a story, and her face was white. But it was all clear to me then, for I could not know who the bad man was—the bad man who made two sisters each think the other dead. And I was for helping her to tell them. Oh, may God bless her for her beautiful face—so pale it was! And then she told me 'twas written by my husband." Some new puzzle confronted her, and she repeated, haltingly:—"By ... my ... husband!" Then quite suddenly, struck by a new idea:—"But was it? How could she know?"

"My dear, she showed it to her father, the Earl, and they were of one mind. His lordship read the letter. Dr. Nash told me. But it was Thornton's own letter to me that said you were dead. I have got it still." She was stopped by the return of Ruth Thrale, who had been half waked by her mother's raised voice five minutes since, and had struggled to complete consciousness under the sense of some burden of duty awaiting her outside the happy oblivion of her stinted sleep. "How has she been?" was her question on entering.

Granny Marrable could not give any clear account of the past hour of talk; it was growing hazy to her, as reaction after excitement told, more and more. Ruth asked no further questions, and urged her to go and lie down—was ready to force her to do it, but she conceded the point, and was just going, when her sister stopped her, speaking clearly, without moving on the pillow.

"What was the letter?"

"What letter is she speaking of?" said Ruth.

Granny Marrable said with an effort:—"The letter that said she was dead."

"Show it to me—show it me now, with the light! You have got it."

"Yes. I said to her that I had got it. But it is put away." This was under Granny Marrable's breath, that old Maisie should not hear.

But she heard, and turned her head. "Oh, Phoebe, let me see it! Can it not be got? Cannot Ruth get it?" She seemed feverishly alive, for the moment, to all that was passing.

Ruth, thinking it would be better to satisfy her if possible, said:—"Is it hard to find? Could I not get it?" To which old Phoebe replied:—"I know where it is to lay hands on at once. But I grudge setting eyes on it now, and that's the truth." Ruth wondered at this—it made her mother's eagerness to see it seem the stranger. The story is always on the edge of calling old Maisie Ruth's "new mother." Her mind was reeling under the consciousness of two mothers with a like claim—a bewildering thought! She wavered between them, and was relieved when the speaker continued:—"You may unlock my old workbox over yonder. The letter be inside the lid, behind the scissors. I'll begone to lie down a bit on your bed, child!" Was old Phoebe running away from that letter?

Ruth knew the trick of that workbox of old. It brought back her early childhood to find the key concealed in a little slot beneath it; hidden behind a corner of green cloth beyond suspicion; that opened, for all that, when the edge was coaxed with a finger-nail. It had been her first experience of a secret, and a fascination hung about it still. That confused image of a second mother, growing dimmer year by year in spite of a perfunctory system of messages maintained in the correspondence of the parted twins, had never utterly vanished; and it had clung about this workbox, a present from Maisie to Phoebe, even into these later years. It crossed Ruth's mind as she found the key, how, a year ago, when the interior of this box was shown to Dave Wardle by his country Granny, his delight in it, and its smell of otto of roses that never failed, had stirred forgotten memories; and this recollection, with the mystery of that vanished mother still on earth—close at hand, there in the room!—made her almost dread to raise the box-lid. But she dared it, and found the letter, though her brain whirled at the entanglements of life and time, and she winced at the past as though scorched by a spiritual flame. It took her breath away to think what she had sought and found; the hideous instrument of a wickedness almost inconceivable—her own father's!

"Oh, how I hope it is that! Bring it—bring it, my dear, my Ruth—my Ruth for me, now! Yes—show it me with the light, like that." Thus old Maisie, struggling to raise herself on the bed, but with a dangerous spot of colour on her cheek, lately so pale, that said fever. Ruth trembled to admit the word to her mind; for, think of her mother's age, and the strain upon her, worse than her own!

Nevertheless, it was best to indulge this strong wish; might, indeed, be dangerous to oppose it. Ruth bolstered up the weak old frame with pillows, and lit two candles to give the letter its best chance to be read. She found her mother's spectacles, though in doubt whether they could enable her to read the dim writing, written with a vanishing ink, even paler than the forged letter Gwen and her father had unearthed. Possibly the ink had run short, and was diluted.

Old Maisie strove to read the writing, gasping with an eagerness her daughter found it hard to understand; but failed to decipher anything beyond, "My dear Sister-in-law." She dropped the letter, saying feebly:—"Read—you read!"

Then Ruth read:—

"'I take up my pen to write you fuller particulars of the great calamity that has befallen me. For I am, as my previous letter will have told you, if it has reached you ere this, a widower. I am endeavouring to bear with resignation the lot it has pleased God to visit upon me, but in the first agonies of my grief at the loss of my beloved helpmeet I was so overwhelmed as to be scarce able to put pen to paper. I am now more calm and resigned to His will, and will endeavour to supply the omission.

"'My dear Maisie was in perfect health and spirits when she went to visit a friend, Mary Ann Stennis, the wife of a sheep-farmer, less than thirty miles from where I now write, on the Upper Derwent, one of the few women in this wild country that was a fit associate for her. She was to have started home in a few days' time, but the horse that should have carried her, the only one she could ride, being a timid horsewoman, went lame and made a delay, but for which delay it may be God would have spared her to me. But His will be done! It seems she was playing with the baby of a native black, there being a camp or tribe of them near at hand, she being greatly diverted with the little monster, when its sister, but little older than itself, found a scorpion beneath a stone, and set it to bite its little brother. Thereupon Maisie, always courageous and kindhearted, must needs snatch at this most dangerous vermin, to throw it at a distance from the children....'"

Old Maisie interrupted the reader. Her face was intent, and her eyes gleamed with an unhealthy, feverish light. "Stop, my dear," said she. "This is all true."

"All true!" Surely her mind was giving way. So thought Ruth, and shuddered at the gruesome thought. "Mother—mother—how can it be true?"

"All quite true, my dear, but for one thing! All true but for who it was! It was not I—it was Mary Ann was at play with little Saku. And the scorpion bit her hand, and she died of the bite.... Yes—go on! Read it all!" For Ruth had begun:—"Shall I—must I?" as though the reading it was unendurable.

She resumed, with an effort:—

"'But got bitten in the arm. At first she made light of the wound, for the reptile was so small. But it became badly inflamed, and no doctor was at hand. The black mother of Saku, the baby, prayed to be allowed to summon the conjurer doctor of the tribe, who would suck the wound. But Maisie would not have this, so only external applications were made ...'"

Old Maisie interrupted:—"That is not so," she said. "Roomoro, the doctor, sucked hard at the bite, and spat out the poison in a hole in the ground, to bury the evil spirit. But it was no good. Poor Mary Ann Stennis died a week after. I mind it well."

Ruth thought to herself:—"Is this a feverish dream?" and wavered on the answer. The tale her mother told of the black medicine-man was nightmare-like. All this, fifty years ago! Her head swam too much for speech, reading apart. She could continue, mechanically:—

"' ... Only external applications were made, which proved useless, as is almost invariably the case with poisonous bites. Next day it became evident that the poison was spreading up the arm, and a black runner was despatched to summon me, but he could not cover the ground in less than three hours, and when he arrived I was on my way to Bothwell, some twenty miles in another direction, so he did not overtake me until the evening. I was then detained a day, so that it was over forty-eight hours before I arrived at Stennis's. It was then too late for effectual remedy, and my dear wife died in my arms within a week of the scorpion bite....'"

"That is not true—it was over a week." Was Maisie really alive to the facts, to be caught by so small a point? She had seen a simple thing that could be said. That is all the story can think.

Ruth said:—"Here is more—only a little!" and continued:—

"'I am thankful to say that, considering the nature of the case, her sufferings were slight, and she passed away peacefully, desiring with her last breath that I should convey to you the assurance of her unchanged affection.'

"It is untrue—it is untrue!" moaned Maisie. "Mary Ann died in great pain, from the poison of the bite working in the blood." She seemed to grasp very little of the facts, for she added:—"But was he not good, to hide the pain for Phoebe's sake?" Her mind was catching at fragments, to understand, and failed.

There was another letter, which Ruth opened, of an earlier date. It was a merely formal announcement of the death. She put back the letters in the workbox-lid, behind the scissors; replaced the workbox on its table as before, and returned to her mother. She was glad to find her still, with her eyes closed; but with that red spot on her cheek, unchanged. It was best to favour every approach of sleep, and this might be one. Ruth sat silent, all her faculties crippled, and every feeling stunned, by what she had gone through since Gwen's first arrival yesterday.

This terrible night had worn itself out, and she knew that that clock-warning meant six, when the stroke should come. But there was no daylight yet. Those movements in the kitchen must be Elizabeth-next-door, come according to promise. That was what the guardian-dog from without meant, pushing his way through the bedroom-door, reporting an incomer whom he knew, and had sanctioned. He communicated the fact to his satisfaction, and returned to his post, leaving his mistress the better for his human sympathy, which seemed to claim knowledge of passing event. It comforted her to feel that the day was in hand, and that its light would come. Who could say but its ending might find her convinced that this was all true? Blank, sickening doubts of the meaning of everything flitted across her mind, and she longed to settle down to realities, to be able to love this new mother without flinching. For that was what she felt, that the mystery of this resurrection seared or burnt her. One thing only soothed her—that this was dear old Mrs. Prichard whom she had learned to love before its bewilderments were sprung upon her. That made it easier to bear.

Presently she roused herself, for, was not this morning? A grey twilight, not over-misty for the time of year, was what a raised window-curtain showed her, and she let it fall to deal with it in earnest, and relieve the blind from duty. Then she made sure, by the new light, that all was well with old Maisie—mere silence, no insensibility—and went out to speak with Elizabeth-next-door, and get more wood for the fire. But first she blew out the candles and the rushlight, already dying spasmodically.

Elizabeth-next-door was a strengthening influence, able to look facts in the face. She almost elided forewords and inquiries, to come to her strong point, the way she had used the strange story to produce surprise in her husband; a worthy man, but imperturbable by anything short of earthquakes or thunderbolts. "Ye may sa-ay your vairy worst to Sam," said Elizabeth, "and he'll just sa-ay back, 'Think a doan't knaw that,' he'll say, 'afower ever yow were born?' and just gwarn with his sooper. And I give ye my word, Widow Thrale, I no swooner told it him than there he sat! An' if he come down on our ta-able wi' th' fla-at of his ha-and once, that he did thrice and mower, afower he could sa-ay one word. He did, and went nigh to break it, but it be o-ak two-inch thick a'mo-ast. Then a said, 'twas enough to wa-aken oop a ma-an all through the night, he did!" He seemed, however, not to have suffered in this way, for his wife added:—"Wa-aken him oop? Not Sam, I lay! Ta-akes a souse o' cold pig to wa-aken up Sam afower t' marnin!" Ruth felt braced by this bringing of the event within human possibilities. Improbable possibilities surprise. Impossible events stun.

She co-operated in domesticities with her useful neighbour, glancing once or twice at the figure on the bed, and reinforced in the belief that all was safe there, for the time. For she saw what seemed slight natural movement, for ease. Presently she went to hear how it fared with her other mother, her normal one. The cross purposes of her relations to the two old sisters were an entanglement of perplexities.

Granny Marrable, asleep when Ruth looked stealthily in at her, was waked by a creak with which the door just contrived to disappoint hopes of a noiseless escape. She called after her:—"Yes, who's that?" Whereupon Ruth returned. It was their first real word alone since the disclosure.

"Oh, mother, have you slept?" She kissed the old worn-out face tenderly; feeling somehow the reserve of strength behind the response she met. "Oh, can you—can you—make it out?... Yes, she is lying still. She has seen that letter." She dropped her voice, and shuddered to name it.

"My dear," said Granny Marrable, answering her question, "I cannot say truly yet that I can make it out. But I thank God for letting me be able to know that this must be Maisie. For I know her for Maisie, when she talks of the bygone time. And that letter—God is good, for that! For it was that told of how she died—that wicked poison-bite! My child, it has never gone quite out of my heart to think your mother died so far away in such pain—never in all these years! And now I know it for an untruth. I thank God for that, at least!"

"She says," said Ruth, checkmated in an attempt to use any name she could call her real mother by, without some self-blame for the utterance, "she says the story is one-half true, but 'twas her best friend died of the bite—not she! But she died in great suffering."

"Ah—the poor thing! Mary Ann Stennis."

"That was the name."

"Will she be able to tell more? Will she tell us who her husband was?"

"Her husband!" Ruth thought this was new trouble—that the Granny's head had given way under the strain. "Her husband was my father, mother," said she. "Think!"

But old Phoebe was quite clear. "I am all right, child," said she reassuringly. "Her second husband. Marrable was my second, you know, else I would still have been Cropredy. Why is she not Daverill?"

Ruth was really the less clear of the two. "Oh yes!" said she wonderingly. "She is Mrs. Prichard, still."

"Please God we shall know all!... What was that?"

"I must go to her.... Come!" For old Maisie had called out. Her daughter went back to her quickly, and Granny Marrable followed, not far behind.

"Come, dear, come.... I called for you to know.... Come, Phoebe, come near, and let me tell you.... He was not so wicked.... Oh no, oh no—it was none of his own doing—I shall be able ... directly...." Thus old Maisie, gasping for breath, and falling back on the pillow from which she had part risen. The hectic flush in her face was greater, and her eyes were wild under her tangle of beautiful silver hair. Both were afraid for her, for each knew what fever might, mean. They might lose her, almost without a renewal of life together.

Still, it might be no more than the agitation of a moment, a passing phase. They tried to pacify her. How could the letter be none of Daverill's own doing? But she would not be soothed—would say the thing she had set her mind to say, but failed to find the words or breath for. What was it she was trying to say? Was it about the letter?

Elizabeth-next-door came into the room, tentatively. Ostensible reason, inquiry about breakfast; actual reason, curiosity. Sounds of speech under stress had aroused, and a glance at old Maisie intensified it. Widow Thrale would come directly, but for the moment was intent on hearing what Mrs. Prichard was saying. To Elizabeth, Maisie continued Mrs. Prichard.

She would not leave unsaid this thing she was bent on:—"No, dear! No, dear! It does not hurt me to talk, but I want time.... I will tell you ... I must tell you.... I know it.... It was not his own doing.... He was set on to do it by a devil that possessed him.... There are devils loose among the blacks...."

The pulse in the hand Ruth held was easy to find. Yes, that was fever! Ruth left her to speak with Elizabeth, and the hand went over to its fellow, in Granny Marrable's.

"Phoebe, dearest, that is so—and in those days there were a many blacks. But they were fewer and fewer after that, and none in our part when we came away, my son and I.... Phoebe!"

"What, dearest?"

"You must say nothing of him to Ruth. He was her brother."

"Say nothing of him to Ruth—why not?" She had lost sight of her adventure with the convict, and did not identify him. She may have fancied some other son accompanied her sister home.

"Yes—yes—nothing to her! He is not fit to speak of—not fit to think of.... Do not ask about him. Forget him! I do not know if he be alive or dead."

Then an image of the convict, or madman, flashed across Phoebe's mind. She dared not talk of him now, with that wild light and hectic flush in her sister's face; it would only make bad worse. But a recollection of her first association of him with the maniac in the Gadarene tombs was quick on the heels of this image, and prompted her to say:—"Had no evil spirit power over him, then, as well as his father?"

The wild expression on old Maisie's face died down, and gave place to one that was peace itself by comparison. "I see it all now," said she. "Yes—you are right! It was after his father's death he became so wicked." It was the devil that possessed his father, driven out to seek a home, and finding it in the son. That was apparently what her words implied, but there was too much of delirium in her speech and seeming to justify their being taken as expressing a serious thought.

Old Phoebe sat beside her, trying now and again with quiet voice and manner to soothe and hush away the terrible memories of the audacious deception to which each owed a lifelong loss of the other. But when fever seizes on the blood, it will not relax its hold for words.

One effect of this was good, in a sense. It is true, as the poet said, that one fire burns out another's burning—or at any rate that one pain is deadened by another anguish—and it was a Godsend to Granny Marrable and Ruth Thrale that an acupression of immediate anxiety should come to counteract their bewilderment, and to extinguish for the time the conflagration of a thousand questions—whys, whens, and wherefores innumerable—in their overburdened minds. Visible fever in the delicate frame, to which it seemed the slightest shock might mean death, was a summons to them to put aside every possible thought but that of preserving what Time had spared so long, though Chance had been so cruel an oppressor. It would be the cruellest stroke of all that she should be thus strangely restored to them, only to be snatched away in an hour.

Presently she seemed quieter; the fever came in gusts, and rose and fell. She had once or twice seemed almost incoherent, but it passed away. Meanwhile Granny Marrable's memory of that madman or criminal, who had at least known the woman he claimed as his mother well enough to be mystified by her twin sister, rankled in her mind, and made it harder and harder for her to postpone speech about him. She would not tell the incident—she was clear of that—but would it harm Maisie to talk of him? She asked herself the question the next time her sister referred to him, and could not refrain from letting her speech about him finish.

It came of her mind drifting back to that crazy notion of an evil spirit wandering to seek a home; as the hermit-crab, dispossessed of one shell, goes in search of another. After a lull which had looked for a moment like coming sleep, she said with an astonishing calmness:—"But do you not see, Phoebe dear, do you not see how good his father must have been, to do no worse than he did? See what the devil that possessed him could do with Ralph—my youngest, he was; Isaac died—a good boy, quite a good boy, till I lost his father! Oh—see what he came to do!"

"He ... he was sent to prison, was he not?" After saying it, old Phoebe was afraid she might have to tell the whole tale of how she knew it. But she need not have feared. Old Maisie was in a kind of dreamland, only half-cognisant of what was going on about her.

Her faint voice wandered on. "I was not thinking of that. That was nothing! He stole some money, and it cost him dear.... No!—it was worse than that—a bad thing!... It was not the girl's fault.... Emma was a good girl...."

Granny Marrable was injudicious. But it was an automatic want of judgment, bred of mind-strain. She could not help saying:—"Was that Emma Drax?" For the name, which she had heard from the convict, had hung on her mind, always setting her to work to fashion some horrible story for its owner.

"Yes—Emma Drax.... They found her guilty.... I do not mean that.... What is it I mean?... I mean they laid it all at her door.... Men do!" This seemed half wandering, and Granny Marrable hoped it meant a return of sleep. She was disappointed. For old Maisie became more restless and hot, starting convulsively, catching at her hand, and exclaiming:—"But how came you to know?—how came you to know? You were not there then. Oh, Phoebe dearest, you were not there then." She kept on saying this, and Granny Marrable despaired of finding words to explain, under such circumstances. The tale of her meeting with the convict was too complex. She thought to herself that she might say that Maisie had spoken the name as a dream-word, waking. But that would have been a fib, and fibs were not her line.

"I went myself to get him," said Ruth, reappearing after a longer absence than old Phoebe had anticipated. She was removing an out-of-door cloak, and an extempore headwrap, when she entered the room. "How is she?" she asked.

Old Phoebe shook her head doubtfully. "Whom did you go for, child? The doctor? I'm glad."

"I thought it better.... Mother darling!—how are you?" She knelt by the bed, held the burning hands, looked into the wild eyes. "Yes—I did quite right," she said.

Dr. Nash came, not many minutes later. Whether the mixture to be taken every two hours, fifty years ago, was the same as would have been given now, does not concern the story. It, or the reassurance of the doctor's visit, had a sedative effect; and old Maisie seemed to sleep, to the great satisfaction of her nurses. What really did credit to his professional skill was that he perceived that a visit from Lady Gwendolen would be beneficial. A message was sent at once to John Costrell, saying that an accompanying letter was to be taken promptly to the Towers, to catch her ladyship before she went out. We have seen that it reached her in time.

"You found that all I told you was true, Granny Marrable," said the doctor, after promising to return in time to catch her ladyship.

"I shall live to believe it true, doctor, please God!"

"Tut tut! You see that it is true."

"Yes, indeed, and I know that yonder is Maisie, come back to life. I know it by thinking; but 'tis all I can do, not to think her still dead."

"She can talk, I suppose—recollects things? Things when you were kids?"

"God 'a' mercy, yes, doctor! Why—hasn't she told me how she drew my tooth, with a bit of silk and a candle, and knew which drawer-knob it was, and the days she saw her husband first, a-horseback?... Oh, merciful Heavens, how had he the heart?"

"Some chaps have the Devil in 'em, and that's the truth!"

"That's what she says. She just made my flesh creep, a-telling how the devils come out of the black savages, to seize on Christians!"

But the doctor was not prepared to be taken at his word, in this way. Devils are good toys for speech, but they are not to be real. "Lot of rum superstitions in those parts!" said he. "Now look you here, ma'am! When I come back, I shall expect to hear that you and your daughter.... Oh ah!—she's not your daughter! What the deuce is she?"

"Ruth has always been my niece, but we have gone near to forget it, times and again. 'Tis so many a long year!"

"Well—I shall expect to hear that you and your niece have had a substantial breakfast. You understand—substantial! And you must make her take milk, or gruel. You'll find she won't eat."

"Beef-tea?"

"No—at least, have some ready, in case. But her temperature is too high. Especially at her time of life!" The doctor walked briskly away. He had not had the gig out, for such a short distance.