n. Will you please come round, m'm?"

"Yes--I shall be there directly," said Sheila, too bewildered and
stunned to think of the possibility of meeting her husband there.

The girl left, and Sheila still stood in the middle of the room
apparently stupefied. That old woman had got into such a habit of
talking about her approaching death that Sheila had ceased to believe
her, and had grown to fancy that these morbid speculations were
indulged in chiefly for the sake of shocking bystanders. But a dead
man or a dead woman is suddenly invested with a great solemnity; and
Sheila with a pang of remorse thought of the fashion in which she had
suspected this old woman of a godless hypocrisy. She felt, too, that
she had unjustly disliked Mrs. Lavender--that she had feared to go
near her, and blamed her unfairly for many things that had happened.
In her own way that old woman in Kensington Gore had been kind to her:
perhaps the girl was a little ashamed of herself at this moment that
she did not cry.

Her father went out with her, and up to the house with the dusty ivy
and the red curtains. How strangely like was the aspect of the house
inside to the very picture that Mrs. Lavender had herself drawn of
her death! Sheila could remember all the ghastly details that the old
woman seemed to have a malicious delight in describing; and here they
were--the shutters drawn down, the servants walking about on tiptoe,
the strange silence in one particular room. The little shriveled
old body lay quite still and calm now; and yet as Sheila went to the
bedside, she could hardly believe that within that forehead there was
not some consciousness of the scene around. Lying almost in the same
position, the old woman, with a sardonic smile on her face, had spoken
of the time when she should be speechless, sightless and deaf, while
Paterson would go about stealthily as if she was afraid the corpse
would hear. Was it possible to believe that the dead body was not
conscious at this moment that Paterson was really going about in
that fashion--that the blinds were down, friends standing some little
distance from the bed, a couple of doctors talking to each other in
the passage outside?

They went into another room, and then Sheila, with a sudden shiver,
remembered that soon her husband would be coming, and might meet her
and her father there.

"You have sent for Mr. Lavender?" she said calmly to Mrs. Paterson.

"No, ma'am," Paterson said with more