ght responsibility; but
her eyes showed more than want of sleep. The two women stopped, looked
long at each other; then Mrs. Tiffany took Eleanor tenderly in her
arms and kissed her.

"Don't you worry, dear," she whispered, "he will get well, and
everything will be all right with Edward and me."

Eleanor did not answer at first. She drew a little away from her
aunt's embrace, before she found tongue to say:

"Please don't speak of that, Aunt Mattie--oh, not of that now!"

As she made her way out to the piazza, in an instinctive search for
air and room, she was crying.

In the limpness of reaction, she sank into a chair. Every joint and
muscle, she realized now, ached and creaked. She could lift her arms
only after taking long thought with herself; and the soul within was
as burned paper.

The front gate clicked. The first, doubtless, of those inquiring
visitors who would read a meaning into the adventures of last night.
That, too, was to be faced this day! The pattering, hurrying footsteps
sounded near to her before she looked up and recognized Kate
Waddington.

If Kate had been crying, the only evidence was a hasty powdering which
left streaks of white and pink before her ears. On first glance,
Eleanor marvelled at her appearance of control, at the lack of
emotion in her face. But insight rather than conscious vision told
Eleanor of the currents which were running under that mask. At the
bottom Eleanor detected a fear which was not only apprehension of the
news from Bertram Chester, but also a cowardly shrinking from the
situation. She fancied that she could even trace Kate's consideration
of the proper shade of acting in the circumstances. All this in the
moment before Kate sprang up the steps and asked:

"Oh, will he live?"

A baser nerve in Eleanor quivered with the desire to be cruel. She had
to put it down before she could tell the simple truth. One little
corner of Kate's mouth quivered and jerked for a second under her
teeth before she caught herself and resumed the impersonation of a
solicitous friend.

"Tell me all about it," she said.

"Ah, I am too tired!" Nevertheless, Eleanor did manage a plain tale,
ending with the nurse's report and with her own conviction that he
would live.

"Oh, of course he will live!" And then--"Who is nursing him?"

She looked up on this question, which was also an appeal, a begging.

"We have a nurse," answered Eleanor shortly. It gratified her a
little, in her