ss, that Fate turned and
smote him with the sharpest weapon in her armoury....

He had not even heard his mother was ill. He had just received her
ecstatic response to his wire--and that very night she came to him,
vividly, as he hovered on the confines of sleep.

There she stood by his bed, in her mother-o'-pearl gown and sari; clear
in every detail; lips just parted; a hovering smile in her eyes. And
round about her a shimmering radiance, as of moonbeams, heightened her
loveliness, yet seemed to set her apart; so that he could neither touch
her nor utter a word of welcome. He could only gaze and gaze, while his
heart beat in long slow hammer-strokes, with a double throb between.

With a gesture of mute yearning her hands went out to him. She stooped
low and lower. A faint breeze seemed to flit across his forehead as if
her lips, lightly brushing it, had breathed a blessing.

Then, darkness fell abruptly--and a deep sleep....

He woke late next morning: woke to a startling, terrible certainty that
his vision had been no dream; that her very self had come to him--that
she was gone....

When the bitter truth reached him, he learnt, without surprise, that on
the night of his vision, her spirit passed....

* * * * *

It was a sharp attack of pneumonia that gave her the _coup de grace_.
But, in effect, the War had killed her, as it killed many another
hyper-sensitive woman, who could not become inured to horror on horror,
tragedy on tragedy, whose heart ached for the sorrows of others as if
they were her own. And her personal share had sufficiently taxed her
endurance, without added pangs for others, unseen and unknown.
George--her baby--had gone down in the Queen Mary. Jerry, too early sent
out to France, had crashed behind the German lines; and after months of
uncertainty they had heard he was alive, wounded--in German hands. Tara,
faithful to the Women's Hospital in Serbia, had been constantly in
danger, living and moving among unimaginable horrors. Nevil, threatened
with septic poisoning, had only been saved at the cost of his left
forearm. Not till he was invalided out, near the close of 1916, had he
realised--too late--that she was killing herself by inches, with work
that alone could leaven anxiety--up to a point.

But it was the shock of Roy's imprisonment and the agony of suspense
that finally stretched her nerve to breaking-point; so that the sudden
onslaught of pneumonia h