A week had gone by, and Margaret was still at Bryanston Square.

She had lost count of time; she could not have told how long ago she had left the preacher on the threshold of the old house in which her childhood and girlhood had been passed.

"Ye'll find me when ye want me. Ye'd best stay wi' him till th' end," Barnabas had said.

He had caught a glimpse of the grand hall, of the painted walls and ceilings; then the door had shut between them, and he had turned away rather grimly. Those heathen gods and goddesses seemed to the preacher fitting ornaments for the "heathenism" of luxury. But Margaret had gone up the shallow stairs, looking neither to right nor left, straight to her father at last! no one hindering. Mr. Deane was propped up on pillows; his breath was coming short and fast, his eyes were very bright, his whole soul seemed in them. When Meg crossed the room, the strained look relaxed; when she knelt by his side, he laughed weakly.

"Ah, I thought you'd do it, Meg!" he said. "Forgive? why, little daughter, between you and me that's not the word! but you're—you're mine again—and home!"

He shut his eyes then, like a tired child who goes to sleep when its treasure is put into its hand; and Meg knelt on motionless, with her head on the pillow by his side. She had neither sight nor hearing for any one else.

He dozed, it might be for half an hour; then woke again, and the nurse, who had been sitting at the foot of the bed, got up and moved softly about, and brought a cup of arrowroot to him, and Meg fed him in spoonfuls.

He was too weak to lift his hand to his lips; but he whispered to her to turn to the light, and to take off her bonnet, that he might see her better. She laid it on the floor by her side, uncovering the short waves of hair, that grew, exactly as her father's grew, low on the forehead.

"Has he cut off your hair, Meg?" said Mr. Deane. The sight seemed to distress, even to make him a little angry. "He had no business to do that!"

"He didn't," said Meg. "I cut it off myself long ago. Barnabas was sorry when he noticed that it was gone."

"Well, I'm glad he had the grace to be sorry. Don't go away." And he fell asleep again, with his hand on hers.

It was like a dream to be sitting in that softly carpeted room, with the scent of roses in the air, and the companions of her girlhood round her.

Laura came softly in presently, and sat down beside her. The sisters looked at each other for a moment, not daring to speak, lest they should wake him. Laura tried to smile a welcome; then her blue eyes filled with unusual tears.

"Meg, Meg! Is it you really? Will you vanish, if I kiss you? Is it safe to try?" she asked under her breath.

Meg leaned forward, without releasing her hand, and they kissed softly.

"I shall stay—till the end," she whispered in return.

So, very quietly and gently, Margaret Thorpe stole back to the place Meg Deane had left; but knew, even while her heart was filled with thankfulness, that, though the place might be the same, yet the girl who had left it would return no more.

Mr. Deane woke with a contented smile on his lips. "I dreamt of you, my Meg," he said. And, from that moment, he seemed to have simply put aside all that had happened since Meg had been his spoilt darling of long ago.

His mind wandered to her nursery rather than to her girlish days—to that very far away time, before Mrs. Russelthorpe's reign, when his little girl had sat on his knee, and ruled him with sweet baby tyranny.

Margaret tried once to recall his mind to the present; for her heart ached for a few words that she might treasure—words spoken to her real and womanly self; but the attempt distressed him, and she gave it up.

She slept on the sofa in his room; for he became uneasy when she was out of his sight; but the ebbing away of his life was quiet and gradual as the ebb of a summer sea.

Perhaps the faculty he had always possessed of forgetting troublesome matters helped to make his last days happy.

Apparently he utterly forgot the existence of the preacher. The grown-up daughter had given him more pain than pleasure; but the baby girl had been an unmixed joy. He loved to call her by the old pet names of her childhood. Laura, who came every day, watched her sister wonderingly. Once, when Meg playfully answered some allusion to an old family joke, Laura felt a sudden longing to thrust aside the veil, to ask Meg about all the strange experiences that were surely in the background, to beg her to say whether the preacher was kind or cruel to her; but they both refrained from bringing any subject into that chamber which was already sanctified by the approach of the great healer.

Mrs. Russelthorpe came in one day, and stood by the bedside.

Mr. Deane turned his head away from her, as if her presence reminded him of something he preferred to forget; then, apparently with some effort, he recalled his thoughts.

"You must make friends with your aunt, little Meg. We must bury old grudges before—what is it?—before the sun goes down. It is going down fast!"

Meg held out her hand across the bed—for his sake she would have made friends with any one; but Mrs. Russelthorpe shook her head. "There is no need for us to go through that farce; for his thoughts have wandered again."

"Aunt Russelthorpe," said Meg, "let us both watch by him now; we both care for him—there is room for us both."

"No!" said her aunt. "There is room for only one of us two, Margaret; and he has chosen. Let us have no pretences. Stay where you are. You have won!" and Meg stayed.

She used to read to him by the hour, because he loved the sound of her voice, going on and on in the low monotonous key that soothed him. It was doubtful whether he ever followed the sense of what she read, and, as a matter of fact, Meg, though she would sit half the day with her hand in his and her head bent over a book, would have been puzzled if called on to give an account of what her tongue had been mechanically repeating.

The atmosphere was so peaceful that it seemed as if Time himself stood still for a space with folded wings. "You are keeping so close to me, little Meg," her father said once with a dreamy smile,—"so close, that if you don't take care, when I go through the great gates, you will slip in too by mistake."

Meg pressed closer to him still; and yet, for all her clinging, she knew that there was a life's experience, even now, between him and her.

A thick velvet curtain, curiously embroidered in gold silks, hung across the door. It shut out the whole of the outside world for five days.

At the end of that time, Laura, pushing it aside, touched Meg's shoulder as she sat in her usual place.

"Your husband is outside," she said. "I passed him on my way in. He told me to tell you that he should like a minute's sight of you, but that you need not hurry—he could wait."

Meg made a sign that she would come; and presently, taking a shawl from Laura, slid gently out of the room, while her father's eyes were closed.

She opened the front door and stood at the top of the steps, shivering a little, though the evening was hot, for the flower-scented room upstairs was hotter.

A street musician was playing, and some children were shouting and dancing. After the silence she had left behind that curtain, the merry tune and the unsubdued voices sounded strangely loud and bold.

"My lass," said the preacher. "Ye are lookin' liker a bit o' moonlight than ever! Come down to me."

And Meg, putting the shawl over her head, ran down, and stood beside him on the pavement. They walked down the length of the square together. The street player ceased playing for a moment to stare at the woman who had stepped out of the front door of No. 35 to keep company with a working man, and then the tune ground on again.

"Barnabas," she said in a low voice, "I shall come to you the very moment that—that he does not need me. I do not think Aunt Russelthorpe would keep me a second."

"And you'll not need to ask her!" said the preacher quickly. "Come to me any time, lass; though ye'll find it a bit uncomfortable, I'm afear'd! Still, we'll do somehow."

He frowned, considering the possibilities of Giles' house, then turned to her with a smile. "Do you feel as if ye'd stepped backwards a year or so?"

"No!" said Margaret. "There is no such thing as 'going back,' in reality. Is that Laura making a sign to me? No! it is only the lace curtain moving. He is still asleep, then. Tell me why you came, Barnabas. Had you anything especial to say to me?"

But her glance still rested anxiously on the window.

"Ay, I had some'ut to tell ye," he answered; "though I had nigh forgotten it in seeing ye. I've been a bit fashed about—ye'll be surprised, Margaret—about Mr. Cohen. Do you know whereabouts he lives? Happen, it was a delusion; but yet, I'd as lief be sartain that it's not him who is lyin' murdered i' the marshes."

He paused; but Margaret was too much surprised to speak.

"I'd ha' liked," he went on, more to himself than her, "I'd ha' liked to ha' had it out betwixt him and me, in a fair fight wi' no quarter asked—only I was sworn, and I'm glad I didn't. But that's one thing; and to think o' him bein' struck down from behind, lyin' there alone for days an' nights, helpless i' the sunlight an' the moonlight; cut off wi'out the chance of givin' a free blow; that's different. Where does he live? I must make my mind easy."

Meg was thoroughly roused this time, even to a momentary forgetting of that room upstairs.

"Mr. Sauls murdered!" she said. "It can't be true. What makes you fancy that? It is too horrible; it can't be true!"

She looked at his troubled face anxiously. Had his violent feeling against Mr. Sauls, and his equally strong remorse and efforts to subdue it, given rise to a morbid imagination on the subject? She knew (she understood the preacher better than of old) how violent both his hate and his horror of himself for so hating could be.

"Ay, it's horrible," he answered. "Margaret! when the lust for a man's blood has been strong, and then one hears of a sudden that, mayhap, the man's been killed, one feels as if one's own thought had gotten shape and killed him!"

There was a thrill in the preacher's voice that made Meg draw closer to him. They had reached the end of the square, but she turned again.

"Will you not tell me more?" she asked.

He hesitated. "If I tell ye, do ye hold that I tell ye as countin' ye one wi' mysel'? An' will 'ee feel bound, as I hold myself bound, to keep it secret?"

"Yes," said Meg.

"Some one confessed to me that he'd killed a man as was walking alone across the marshes, an' robbed him. And it came to my mind as it were Mr. Sauls. There aren't many about us as are worth the robbing, an' very few but labourers as takes that way to th' farm. The man as told me was in a sort o' fever; I didn't think he was goin' to live, and no more did he; he was terrible scared o' dying, or I fancy he'd never ha' let it out. All one night he was very bad; then he quieted down an' slept, an' awoke up a bit better, eatin' as if he'd been clemmed, but not takin' notice o' what I said to him, nor seemingly understandin' a word. I tried to persuade him to gi'e himsel' up to justice, but it seemed just waste o' breath. I went down to get him some'ut more to eat, an' when I came back he were gone! he must ha' got his clothes on and just slipped through the window; happen, he understood a bit more nor I thought!"

"Who is the man?" asked Meg, in a horrified whisper.

"I'd as lief not tell ye that," said Barnabas; "for ye'd better not know."

"If—if it is true—what shall you do?"

"Nothing!" he answered decidedly. "What is told i' that way must be as safe as if it hadn't been breathed. I'd ha' tried to make the murderer confess and be hung, for the savin' o' his soul; but I'd not tell on him mysel', I'd sooner go to the gallows; an', mind, ye ha' sworn it shall be th' same wi' you, Margaret."

"Yes," she said; "it shall be the same with me—as if I were yourself." She spoke solemnly, though little guessing all that that promise would mean.

"And after all," she added more lightly, for, indeed, this idea was too startling to realise, "after all, Mr. Sauls is, probably, perfectly well and comfortable. I cannot remember his address, but my sister may know it. I will ask her for it, and send it down to you. Ah, she is waving her hand to me at the window. Father must be awake."

"I must e'en let ye go, I suppose," said Barnabas; "for, an' I hold ye, your soul 'ull slip through my fingers, an' go an' watch by him all the same. God be with ye, my dear!"

He released her unwillingly, and Margaret ran back to her father. Mr. Deane was wide awake and slightly flushed.

"Meg! Meg! I dreamed I had lost you, that you had leaped over a precipice," he cried.

He was excited, and not quite himself. He recognised her on her return to his room; but, as the day wore on, he became more feverish, and in the evening he was delirious.

All through the night he talked eagerly to his dead wife, evidently believing her to be present; but in the small hours the fever left him, and, in the collapse that followed it, he died. He died with Meg's hand clasped in his, with his head on his sister's shoulder; but unconscious of the presence of either of the women, each of whom had, in her way, loved him better than all else in the world.

Laura stood at the foot of the bed during the last terrible hour, with her arm round Kate, who had come just in time. Kate kept turning her beautiful head away,—she could hardly bear to see this death struggle.

Margaret's eyes never moved from her father's face. When Mr. Deane's head fell forward on his breast, the last sobbing breath drawn, the awful involuntary fight for life over, Meg's expression relaxed, as if she, too, were relieved.

"It is over!" she said.

Only when some one tried to unclasp the living hand from his she fell on her knees with a smothered cry—after all, she had not gone with him.

Laura led Kate away, crying bitterly; if Mr. Deane had been the best and most dependable father on earth, instead of merely the most charmingly affectionate when he happened to be at home, they would not have loved him more, possibly they would have loved him less; for a woman's love will fill up the measure wherein a man falls short of what he might have been.

Mrs. Russelthorpe closed his eyes—eyes that had looked their last on a world which had generally treated him very well; then went to her room with lips pressed closely together.

Meg knelt on till the grey dawn crept in, and some one entering disturbed her.

"You can do no more for him now. Come away; indeed, Meg, you must come," said Laura.

Laura looked pale, and even a little nervous. She dreaded Meg's grief, remembering how "hard" the little sister, whom they had rather neglected, had always taken everything.

But this Meg was not the "little sister" of old; or rather, perhaps, her identity was hidden under a new garb.

She rose from her knees dry-eyed and composed.

"I am going back to my husband," she said. "Father does not want me now, as you say. Barnabas has been very good. He has waited all these days. I should like to stay till after the funeral, but——"

"Come home with me!" said Laura.

She put her hand on her sister's arm and grasped her tightly.

"Don't disappear, Meg! I don't want to lose you; you—you are so like him," she whispered, with a glance at the bed, where that quiet figure lay in the deep peace that neither grief nor love should ever move again.

"I promised Barnabas that I would not stay," said Margaret; but a quiver passed over her face. Laura drew her gently out of the room and shut the door.

"I could not tell you in there," she said, with the sentiment that we all have against talking of mundane matters in the chamber of death, "but I have a message for you from your husband. I went down to give him the address you asked me for yesterday, because I wished to speak to him, to see for myself what sort of a man he is. While I was speaking to him he"—Laura hesitated a second—"he was summoned away. He bid me tell you that he may be absent several days, but that you were not to 'fash' about him, but just bide quiet; if he were not here when the end came, I told him I would take you back with me. He said you would know that he would come for you so soon as ever he could."

"Yes, I know," said Meg simply. "What was the call?"

"He said he was called to a place where he could not have you by him."

Laura coloured, wondering what the next question would be; but Meg was apparently satisfied.

The preacher's movements were apt to be erratic, and his decisions were often arbitrary. The "call" might probably be to some abode of vice and misery into which he shrank from taking her.

"Are you sure you want me, Laura?"

"Quite sure," said Laura emphatically.

She put her arm round her sister while she spoke, and the two left the house together. Barnabas Thorpe had been arrested on Mrs. Russelthorpe's doorstep before Laura's eyes; but there was, she assured herself, no need to tell Meg that, just now.

If he were innocent he would be set free again, and would come to claim his wife quite soon enough; if he were guilty—but no! oddly enough, Laura found it simply impossible to believe him guilty. The big gaunt man with the deeply furrowed face and the eager eyes, that had the look of the enthusiast and potential martyr in them, had impressed her curiously. Laura had felt no name too bad for the canting rascal who had stolen Margaret; but the reality and intense personality of the preacher had at least momentarily pierced through her prejudice.

Barnabas Thorpe was no hypocrite; her womanly instinct spoke for him, though her pride and reason were against him. The last-named qualities woke up only when the spell of his presence was removed.

"I am glad he has gone; after all, you belong to us, Meg," she said.