r best."

He sighed. There was silence till they turned into Wimpole Street and
were in sight of the nursing home. Then Connie said in a queer, strained
voice: "You don't know that it was partly I who did it."

Sorell turned upon her with a sudden change of expression. It was as
though she had said something he had long expected, and now that it was
said a great barrier between them had broken down. He looked at her with
shining eyes from which the veil of reserve had momentarily lifted. She
saw in them both tenderness and sorrow.

"I don't think you need feel that," he said gently. Her lips trembled.
She looked straight before her into the hot vista of the street.

"I just played with him--with his whole future, as it's turned
out--without a thought."

Sorell knew that she was thinking of the Magdalen ball, of which he had
by now heard several accounts. He guessed she meant that her provocation
of Falloden had contributed to the tragedy, and that the thought
tormented her. But neither of them mentioned Falloden's name. Sorell put
out his hand and grasped hers. "Otto's only thought about you is that
you gave him the happiest evening he ever spent in England," he said
with energy. "You won't misunderstand."

Her eyes filled with tears. But there was no time to say more. The
hansom drew up.

[Illustration: _Connie sat down beside Radowitz and they looked at each
other in silence_]

They found Radowitz lying partly dressed on the balcony of his back
room, which overlooked a tiny walled patch of grass and two plane-trees.
The plane-tree seems to have been left in pity to London by some
departing rural deity. It alone nourishes amid the wilderness of brick;
and one can imagine it as feeling a positive satisfaction, a quiet
triumph, in the absence of its stronger rivals, oak and beech and ash,
like some gentle human life escaped from the tyrannies of competition.
These two great trees were the guardian genii of poor Otto's afternoons.
They brought him shade and coolness, even in the hottest hours of a
burning June.

Connie sat down beside him, and they looked at each other in silence.
Sorell, after a few gay words, had left them together. Radowitz held her
hand in his own left. The other was bandaged and supported on a pillow.
"When she got used to the golden light filtering through the plane
leaves, she saw that he was pale and shrunken, that his eyes were more
living and blue than ever, and his hair more like the