on his heels with his back straight, his arms hanging down at his
sides, and his hands clasping the old grey felt hat. His head was
leaning forward, and two tears ran down his sunburned cheeks to the
tangled thickness of his grizzled beard. In the room no sound broke the
stillness.

"I never knew till to-day she'd found it was a lie--I never knew she'd
turned away because she was--she'd found out it wasn't true; and I've
been a hard man all the time because I didn't know. Now, I'd like to put
things straight, just tidy up a bit. I'm no sort of a hand at making
things smooth, but maybe you won't feel us strangers now, and we'll do
the best we can."

It was all he had to tell, all he could say; but it seemed so small and
useless to him when the girl neither spoke nor moved. He waited in
silence for her to give some sign that she heard and understood, and
receiving none, looked up. She was kneeling as she had been when first
he came into the room, as still as the other figure on the bed. He
reached out his hand and touched her arm.

"Miss," he said, as he touched her; but there was neither sound nor
movement in response. "Miss," he repeated, as he put his hand round her
arm lest his touch had not been apparent to her, "we're none of us
strangers, leastways----"

The grip on her arm might have been firmer than he meant; he might
unconsciously have pushed her; but as he began to repeat again the
formula of his sympathy, the only phrase which came to him through the
mists of his sorrow and perplexity, Ailleen moved from her kneeling
position as she slipped, pale and insensible, to the floor.

For a moment Slaughter looked at her. Then he sprang to his feet, and
rushed, wild-eyed and panic-stricken, out of the room, across the
verandah, and down the pathway to the road. The news of Godson's death
having spread through the township, almost the entire population, men
and women, were gathered round the gate. Marmot, anxious in some way to
relieve the uncomfortable feeling he experienced since Slaughter had, as
he thought, complained of being sent for too late, had kept them all
back from going up to the cottage to proffer their help--a restraint the
women members of the community especially resented.

As Slaughter appeared, running bareheaded down the pathway, they turned
towards him; but he only pointed back to the cottage, and mumbled
something they could not understand. The women hastened up, and, finding
Ailleen lying