n iron frame,
shrugged her shoulders and smiled grimly.

"I go first," repeated Ursula in a new and strange voice as her heavy
eyes slowly closed, "but I will come for each of you in turn, when your
lease of life runs out. At that moment I will be with you to lead your
steps whither I now go."

As she spoke the flickering lamp went out suddenly as though
extinguished by a rapid hand, and the room was left in utter darkness.
A strange suffocating noise issued from the bed, and when the trembling
women had relighted the lamp, all that was left of Ursula Mallow was
ready for the grave.

That night the survivors passed together. The dead woman had been a
firm believer in the existence of that shadowy borderland which is said
to form an unhallowed link between the living and the dead, and even the
stolid Tabitha, slightly unnerved by the events of the night, was not
free from certain apprehensions that she might have been right.

With the bright morning their fears disappeared. The sun stole in at
the window, and seeing the poor earth-worn face on the pillow so touched
it and glorified it that only its goodness and weakness were seen, and
the beholders came to wonder how they could ever have felt any dread of
aught so calm and peaceful. A day or two passed, and the body was
transferred to a massive coffin long regarded as the finest piece of
work of its kind ever turned out of the village carpenter's workshop.
Then a slow and melancholy cortege headed by four bearers wound its
solemn way across the marshes to the family vault in the grey old
church, and all that was left of Ursula was placed by the father and
mother who had taken that self-same journey some thirty years before.

To Eunice as they toiled slowly home the day seemed strange and Sabbath-
like, the flat prospect of marsh wilder and more forlorn than usual, the
roar of the sea more depressing. Tabitha had no such fancies. The bulk
of the dead woman's property had been left to Eunice, and her avaricious
soul was sorely troubled and her proper sisterly feelings of regret for
the deceased sadly interfered with in consequence.

"What are you going to do with all that money, Eunice?" she asked as
they sat at their quiet tea.

"I shall leave it as it stands," said Eunice slowly. "We have both got
sufficient to live upon, and I shall devote the income from it to
supporting some beds in a children's hospital."

"If Ursula had wished it to go to a hospital,