black habit. "Lord help
you!" they mourned over her. "Christ pity you, and bring you to yourself
again!"

"Why are you so sorry?" Lynette asked them, knitting her delicate brows,
and peering curiously in their tearful smiling faces. "No!" she corrected
herself; "I mean why are you so glad?"

"Glad is ut, honey!" screamed a huge Irishwoman, throwing a brawny red arm
about the shrinking figure and hugging it. "Begob, wid the Holy Souls
dancin' jigs in Purgatory, an' the Blessed Saints clappin' their han's in
Heaven, we have rayson to be glad! Whirroosh! Ould Erin for ever--an' God
save the Cornel!"

She yelled with all the power of her Celtic lungs, plucked off her
downtrodden shoes, slapped their soles together smartly, and, with a
gesture of royal prodigality, tossed them right and left into the air,
performed a caper of surprising agility on elephantine,
blue-yarn-stocking-covered feet, and was carried away by a roaring surge
of the joyous crowd, vociferating.

Saxham felt the slender hand of his charge tighten upon his arm, and his
heart leaped as he noted the working of the sensitive face and the heaving
of the small, nymph-like bosom under the thin material of her dress. He
hoped, he believed that a change was taking place in her. He said to
himself that the delicate mechanism of her brain, clogged and paralysed by
a great mental shock, was revitalising, storing energy, gaining power;
that the lesion was healing; that she would recover--must recover.

Then his quick eye saw fatigue in her. They took her back out of the dust
and the clamour and the crowd, back to the quiet of the Cemetery.

It happened there. For as she stood again beside the long, low mound
beneath which the heart that had cherished her lay mouldering, they saw
that the tears were running down her face, and that her whole body was
shaken with sobbing. And then, as a wild tornado of cheering, mingled with
drifts of martial music, swept northwards from Market Square, she fell
upon her knees beside the grave, and cried as if to living ears:

"Mother;--oh! Mother, the Relief! They're here! Oh, my own darling--to be
glad without you!..."

She lay there prone, and wept as though all the tears pent up in her since
that numbing double stroke of the Death Angel's sword were flowing from
her now. And Sister Tobias, glancing doubtfully up at Saxham's face, saw
it transfigured and irradiated with a great and speechless joy. For he
knew that the light