s, was directed to Mr. Muller's house, and made his way
up its hard-trodden path of snow, towards the green door, at which he
knocked two or three times before it was opened by a woman, whose hair
and freckled skin were tinted nowhere but in Ireland.

He made a step forward out of the cutting blast into the narrow entry,
and began to ask, 'Is Miss Ward here? I mean, can I see Miss Warden?'
when, as if at the sound of his voice, there rang from within the door
close by a shriek--one of the hoarse hysterical cries he had heard upon
the day of the inquest. Without a moment's hesitation, he pushed open
the door, and beheld a young lady in speechless terror hanging over the
stiffened figure on the couch--the eyes wide open, the limbs straight
and rigid. He sprang forward, and lifted her into a more favourable
posture, hastily asking for simple remedies likely to be at hand, and
producing a certain amount of revival for a few moments, though the
stiffness was not passing--nor was there evidence of consciousness.

'Are you Leonard?' said Cora Muller, under her breath, in this brief
interval, gazing into his face with frightened puzzled eyes.

'No; but I am come to tell her that he is free!' But the words were
cut short by another terrible access, of that most distressing kind
that stimulates convulsion; and again the terrified women instinctively
rendered obedience to the stranger in the measures he rapidly took, and
his words, 'hysteria--a form of hysteria,' were forced from him by the
necessity of lessening Cora's intense alarm, so as to enable her to be
effective. 'We must send for Dr. Laidlaw,' she began in the first
breathing moment, and again he looked up and said, 'I am a physician!'

'Mr. Tom?' she asked with the faintest shadow of a smile; he bent his
head, and that was their introduction, broken again by another
frightful attack; and when quiescence, if not consciousness, was
regained, Tom knelt by the sofa, gazing with a sense of heart-rending
despair at the wasted features and thin hands, the waxen whiteness of
the cheek, and the tokens in which he clearly read long and consuming
illness as well as the overthrow of the sudden shock.

'What is this?' he asked, looking up to Cora's beautiful anxious face.

'Oh, she has been very sick, very sick,' she answered; 'it was an
attack of pleurisy; but she is getting better at last, though she will
not think so, and this news will make all well. Does she hear? Say