hing, except a dull rage at my own
insensibility. Marjory was dead--and I had no tears.

Morning school was a mere pretence that day; we dreaded, for almost the
first time, to see the Doctor's face, but he did not show himself, and
the arrangements necessary for the breaking-up of the school were made
by the matron.

Some, including Ormsby and myself, could not be taken in for some days,
during which we had to remain at the school: days of shadow and
monotony, with occasional ghastly outbreaks of the high spirits which
nothing could repress, even in that house of mourning.

But the time passed at last, until it was the evening of the day on
which Marjory had been left to her last sleep.

The poor father and mother had been unable to stay in the house now that
it no longer covered even what had been their child; and the only two,
besides the matron and a couple of servants who still remained there,
were Ormsby and I, who were both to leave on the following morning.

I would rather have been alone just then with anyone but Ormsby, though
he had never since that fatal night taken the slightest notice of me; he
looked worn and haggard to a degree that made me sure he must have cared
more for Marjory than I could have imagined, and yet he would break at
times into a feverish gaiety which surprised and repelled me.

He was in one of these latter moods that evening, as we sat, as far
apart as possible, in the empty, firelit schoolroom.

'Now, Cameron,' he said, as he came up to me and struck me boisterously
on the shoulder, 'wake up, man! I've been in the blues long enough. We
can't go on moping always, on the night before the holidays, too! Do
something to make yourself sociable--talk, can't you?'

'No, I can't,' I said; and, breaking from him, went to one of the
windows and looked vacantly out into blackness, which reflected the long
room, with its dingy greenish maps, and the desks and forms glistening
in the fire-beams.

The ice-bound state in which I had been so long was slowly passing away,
now that the scene by the little grave that raw, cheerless morning had
brought home remorselessly the truth that Marjory was indeed gone--lost
to me for ever.

I could see now what she had been to me; how she had made my great
loneliness endurable; how, with her innocent, fearless nature, she had
tried to rouse me from spiritless and unmanly dejection. And I could
never hope to please her now by proving that I had learnt th