to kiss her. "Are you so tired, dearest? Perhaps I had
better go away."

But Isabel put up a trembling, skeleton hand and detained her. "No, dear,
no! I am not so tired as that. I can't talk much; but I can listen. Sit
down and tell me about yourself!"

Dinah sat down, but she could think of nothing but the piteous, lined
face upon the pillow and the hopeless suffering of the eyes that looked
forth from it.

She held Isabel's hand very tightly, though its terrible emaciation
shocked her anew, and so for a time they were silent while Isabel seemed
to drift back again into the limitless spaces out of which Dinah's coming
had for a moment called her.

It was Biddy who broke the silence at last, laying a gnarled and
quivering hand upon Dinah as she sat.

"Ye'd better come again in the morning, mavourneen," she said. "She's too
far off to-night to heed ye."

Dinah started. Her eyes were full of tears as she bent and kissed the
poor, wasted fingers she held, realizing with poignant certainty as she
did it the truth of the old woman's statement. Isabel was too far off to
heed.

Then, as she rose to go, a strange thing happened. The tender strains of
a waltz, _Simple Aveu_, floated softly in broken snatches in on the west
wind, and again--as one who hears a voice that calls--Isabel came back.
She raised herself suddenly. Her face was alight, transfigured--the face
of a woman on the threshold of Love's sanctuary.

"Oh, my dearest!" she said, and her voice thrilled as never Dinah had
heard it thrill before. "How I have waited for this! How I have waited!"

She stretched out her arms in one second of rapture unutterable; and then
almost in the same moment they fell. The youth went out of her, she
crumpled like a withered flower.

"Biddy!" she said. "Oh, Biddy, tell them to stop! I can't bear it! I
can't bear it!"

Dinah went to the window and closed it, shutting out the haunting
strains. That waltz meant something to her also, something with which for
the moment she felt she could not cope.

Turning, she saw that Isabel was clinging convulsively to the old nurse,
and she was crying, crying, crying, as one who has lost all hope.

"But it's too late to do her any good," mourned Biddy over the bowed
head. "It's the tears of a broken heart."

CHAPTER XIV

THE WRATH OF THE GODS

The paroxysm did not last long, and in that fact most poignantly did
Dinah realize the waning strength.

Dumbly she stood and w