Gifford rose silently, and they went together between the sweet-smelling
borders, up to the rectory. "I wish I could help you," he said wistfully,
as she turned to say good-night at the foot of the steps.

"You cannot," she answered briefly. "No one can; and there's nothing I
can do to make up for it. I cannot even die as an atonement. Oh, if I
could only die!"

Gifford walked back, distressed and shocked; he was not old enough yet to
know that the desire of death is part of youth, and it seemed as though
he too had incurred a great responsibility. "What a brute I was to say
it!" he said to himself. "I feel as though I had struck a woman. And it
made her wish she was dead,--good heavens! How cruel I was! Yet if it was
true, it must have been right to tell her; I suppose it was my brutal
way!"

Lois went at once to Mrs. Forsythe's bedside, eager to hear of some
improvement, but the invalid only shook her head wearily.

"No, no better," she said; "still breathing, that's all. But you must not
grieve; it only distresses me."

Lois knelt down, and softly kissed her hand.

"My only trouble," Mrs. Forsythe continued, "is about my boy. Who will
take care of him when I am gone?"

She said much more than this, and perhaps even Gifford's persistent
justice could not have sustained the conviction that he had done right to
tell Lois that the blame of the accident rested upon her, if he had known
the thoughts of a possible atonement which passed through her mind when
Mrs. Forsythe spoke thus of her son. It was not the first time since her
injury that she had told Lois of her anxiety for Dick's future, and now
the girl left her with a dazed and aching heart.

Mrs. Dale, full of importance and authority, met her in the hall.

"I've got some beef-tea for Arabella Forsythe," she said, balancing the
tray she carried on one hand, and lifting the white napkin with the other
to see that it was all right, "if I can only persuade her to take it. I
never saw anybody who needed so much coaxing. But there! I must not be
hard on her; she is pretty sick, I must say,--and how she does enjoy it!
I said she would. But really, Lois, if we don't have some word from that
young man soon, I don't know what we shall do, for she is certainly worse
to-night. Your father has just had a letter from somebody, saying that he
went away with some friends on a pleasure trip, and didn't leave his
address. I thought he was so anxious to get to Ashurst,--well