, darling, and must keep quite quiet. You'll soon be all
right again. It was the old black cow that tossed you. The gardener
found you by the swinging gate and carried you in.... You've been
unconscious!"

"How long have I been uncon----?" Jimbo could not manage the whole word.

"About three hours, darling."

Then he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when he woke long after
it was early morning, and there was no one in the room but the old
family nurse, who sat watching beside the bed. Something--some dim
memory--that had stirred his brain in sleep, immediately rushed to his
lips in the form of an inconsequent question. But before he could even
frame the sentence, the thought that prompted it had slipped back into
the deeper consciousness he had just left behind with the trance of deep
sleep.

But the old nurse, watching every movement, waiting upon the child's
very breath, had caught the question, and she answered soothingly in a
whisper--

"Oh, Miss Lake died a few days after she left here," she said in a very
low voice. "But don't think about her any more, dearie! She'll never
frighten children again with her silly stories."

"_DIED!_"

Jimbo sat up in bed and stared into the shadows behind her, as though
his eyes saw something she could not see. But his voice seemed almost to
belong to some one else.

"She was really dead all the time, then," he said below his breath.

Then the child fell back without another word, and dropped off into the
sleep which was the first step to final recovery.

THE END

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

[Transcriber's Note:

The following corrections were made:

p. 52: removed paragraph break after comma (whispered, "My darling boy,)

p. 87: acccomplish to accomplish (she would accomplish)

p. 96: removed paragraph break after comma (and said very gravely, with
her serious eyes fixed on his face, "Miss Lake,)

p. 123: achoed to echoed ("Long!" he echoed,)

p. 181: existance to existence (an existence far antedating)

p. 197: conciousness to consciousness (the consciousness cannot)

p. 204: so to no (no sequence in the order)

Minor punctuation errors and missing spaces between words have been
corrected without note. An oe-ligature in the word manoeuvre has been
replaced with "oe" in the plain text versions.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have not been corrected.]

End of the Project