manner diverse diseases of which they themselves
are organically free, such as epilepsy, or the like. But Lady
Landale's condition is otherwise serious. She is alive; more I cannot
say."

According to his lights, he had bled the patient, as he would have
bled, by rote, to recall to life one actually cut down from the beam.
But, although the young blood did flow, bearing testimony to the fact
that the heart still beat in that deathlike frame, the vitality left
seemed so faint as to defy the power of human ministration.

The flame of life barely flickered; but the powers of youth were of
greater strength in the unconscious body than could have been
suspected, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, they asserted
themselves.

With the return of animation, however, came a new danger: fever,
burning, devastating, more terrible even than the almost mortal
syncope; that fever of the brain which wastes like the rack, before
which science stands helpless, and the watcher sinks into despair at
his impotence to screen a beloved sufferer from the horrible,
ever-recurring phantoms of delirium.

Had not Sir Adrian intuitively known well-nigh every act of the drama
which had already been so fatal to his house, Molly's frenzied
utterances would have told him all. Every secret incident of that
storm of passion which had desolated her life was laid bare to his
sorrowing heart:--her aspirations for an ideal, centred suddenly upon
one man; her love rapture cruelly baulked at every step; the consuming
of that love fire, resisting all frustration of hope, all efforts of
conscience, of honour; how her whole being became merged into that of
the man she loved and whom she had ruined, her life in his life, her
very breath in his breath. And then the lamentable, inevitable end:
the fearful confrontation with his death. Again and again, in never
ceasing repetition, was that fair, most dear body, that harrowed soul,
dragged step by step through every iota of the past torture, always to
fall at last into the same stillness of exhaustion--appalling image of
final death that wrung Adrian with untold agonies of despair.

For many days this condition of things lasted unaltered. In the
physician's own words it was impossible that life could much longer
resist such fierce onslaughts. But one evening a change came over the
spirit of the sufferer's vision.

There had been a somewhat longer interval between the paroxysms; Sir
Adrian seated as usual by