sion--

"I am going to tell my mother at once."

"Would that be safe in her state?" I objected.

"What can be worse than the state she has been in for the last month?
We understand this in another way. The crime is not at his door. Don't
imagine I am defending him before you."

She went to the bedroom door, then came back to ask me in a low murmur
not to go till she returned. For twenty interminable minutes not a sound
reached me. At last Miss Haldin came out and walked across the room with
her quick light step. When she reached the armchair she dropped into it
heavily as if completely exhausted.

Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear. She was sitting up in
bed, and her immobility, her silence, were very alarming. At last she
lay down gently and had motioned her daughter away.

"She will call me in presently," added Miss Haldin. "I left a bell near
the bed."

I confess that my very real sympathy had no standpoint. The Western
readers for whom this story is written will understand what I mean. It
was, if I may say so, the want of experience. Death is a remorseless
spoliator. The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There
is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience. But the
grief I had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations. It
had the associations of bombs and gallows--a lurid, Russian colouring
which made the complexion of my sympathy uncertain.

I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not embarrassing me by an outward
display of deep feeling. I admired her for that wonderful command
over herself, even while I was a little frightened at it. It was the
stillness of a great tension. What if it should suddenly snap? Even the
door of Mrs. Haldin's room, with the old mother alone in there, had a
rather awful aspect.

Nathalie Haldin murmured sadly--

"I suppose you are wondering what my feelings are?"

Essentially that was true. It was that very wonder which unsettled my
sympathy of a dense Occidental. I could get hold of nothing but of some
commonplace phrases, those futile phrases that give the measure of our
impotence before each other's trials I mumbled something to the effect
that, for the young, life held its hopes and compensations. It held
duties too--but of that I was certain it was not necessary to remind
her.

She had a handkerchief in her hands and pulled at it nervously.

"I am not likely to forget my mother," she said. "We used to be three.
Now we a