makes
fiercest hate." He had cast off that love with scorn, she had vowed
revenge, and verily she had had it! Of fortune, of wife and child, and
now of life, it might be, she seemed to have robbed him.

"Oh, forgive me my sin!" her whole stricken soul cried out.

They reached the house, the coachman and the physician lifted the still
senseless man and carried him to an upper chamber. Summoning her
housekeeper to their aid, Norine left them and went in search of the
wounded man's wife.

She found her in her own room lying listlessly, wearily, as usual, upon
a sofa, gazing with tired, hopeless eyes at the fire, while her little
children played about her. Kneeling before her, her face bowed upon the
pillows, her tears falling, her voice broken and choked, Norine told the
story she had come to tell. In the room above her husband lay, injured
it might be unto death.

"If he dies," Norine said, her voice still husky, her face still hidden.
"I shall feel, all my life-long, as though I were his murderess. If he
dies, how shall I answer to Heaven and to you for the work I have done?"

Helen Thorndyke had arisen and stood holding by the sofa for support, an
awful ghastliness on her face, an awful horror in her eyes. Dying!
Laurence dying! and like this!

"Let me go to him!" she said, hoarsely, going blindly forward. "_You_
are not to blame--he wronged you beyond all forgiveness, but I was his
wife and I deserted him. The blame is mine--all mine."

She made her way to the room where they had laid him. On the threshold
she paused, faint almost unto death. The yellow, wintry sunshine slanted
in and filled the chamber. Upon the white bed he lay, rigid and ghastly.
They had washed away the clotted blood, and the face was entirely
uninjured. Worn, haggard, awfully corpse-like, it lay upon the pillows,
the golden, sparkling sunshine streaming across it.

"Laurence! Laurence! Laurence!"

At that anguished cry of love and agony, all fell back before the wife.
She had crossed the room, she had fallen on her knees by the bedside,
she had clasped the lifeless figure in her arms, her tears and kisses
raining upon the still rigid face. All was forgotten, all forgiven--the
bitter wrongs he had done her. Nothing remained but the truth that she
loved him still, that he was her husband, and that he lay here before
her--dying.

Dying! No need to look twice in the physician's sombre countenance to
see that.

"He will not live an hour,"