they had gone, she sat
still in the hall, waiting. Sometimes she looked at the sparkling
thing in her hand (she had caught it up from her lap when her mother
came into the veranda), a slim, flexible string of diamonds for weaving
in the hair--glowing and glimmering like spurts of flame imprisoned
within frozen dewdrops. Sometimes she looked at the great emerald
Denis Harlenden had set on her finger. But her eyes had something of
the fixed, unseeing stare of the sleep-walker. At last Sophia Ozanne
came back and stood beside her. Neither looked at the other.

"What is it mother?" she asked, in a low voice.

"Richard Gardner is very ill. They hoped it was only a sore throat
that would soon yield to treatment; but he went to a specialist
today--that Doctor Stratton who came out to see the Cape governor's
throat--and he seems to think--" Poor Mrs. Ozanne halted and choked as
if she herself were suffering from an affection of the throat. Rosanne
still sat silent and brooding.

"He seems to think it is something malignant--and, in that case, he and
poor Rosalie--" She broke down.

"Will never be able to marry, mother?" asked Rosanne, not curiously,
only sadly, as if she knew already. Her mother nodded.

"Who told you?"

"Richard's brother was at the Chilvers'; he thought we had better know
at once."

Mrs. Ozanne sat down by the little Benares table and, resting her face
on her hands, began to cry quietly. Rosanne stared before her with an
absorbed stare. She seemed in a very transport of grave thought. When
Mrs. Ozanne at length raised her eyes for an almost furtive glance, she
thought she had never seen anything so tragic as her daughter's face.
Her own was working horribly with misery and some urgent necessity.

"Rosanne!" she stammered at last, afraid of the sound of her own words.
"Couldn't you do something?"

The girl removed her dark gaze from nothingness and transferred it to
her mother's imploring, fearful eyes.

"Oh, mother!" she said quietly. "Oh, mother! I am more unhappy than
you or Rosalie can ever be!"

PART II

Rosalie Ozanne kept her bed for a week or more. She had sunk into a
sort of desolate lethargy of mind and body from which nothing could
rouse her. Her mother was in despair. Richard Gardner was too ill to
come to see the girl he loved, and he did not write. The blow that had
fallen upon his promising and prosperous life seemed to have shattered
his nerves and benum