" said the doctor. But before he could carry
out his intention, footsteps were heard, and the handle of the door was
turned. Both men drew back involuntarily into the shadow as Mrs.
Luttrell and Angela came forth.

Angela had been weeping, but there were no signs of tears upon the elder
woman's face. Rigid, white, and hard, it looked almost as if it were
carved in stone; a mute image of misery too deep for tears. There were
lines upon her brow that had never been seen there before; her lips were
tightly compressed; her eyes fiercely bright. She had thrown a black
shawl over her head on coming away from the drawing-room into the
draughty corridors. This shawl, which she had forgotten to remove,
together with the dead blackness of her dress, gave her pale face a
strangely spectral appearance. Clinging to her, and yet guiding her,
came Angela, with the white flower crushed and drooping from her hair.
She also was ashy pale, but there was a more natural and tender look of
grief to be read in her wet eyes and on her trembling lips than in the
stony tranquility of Richard Luttrell's mother.

Brian could not contain himself. He rushed forward and threw himself on
the ground at his mother's feet. Mrs. Luttrell shrank back a little and
clutched Angela's arm fiercely with her thin, white fingers.

"Mother, speak to me; tell me that you--mother, only speak!"

His voice died away in irrepressible sobs which shook him from head to
foot. He dared not utter the word "forgiveness" yet. Unintentional as
the harm might be that his hand had done, it was sadly irreparable, too.

Mrs. Luttrell looked at him with scarcely a change of feature, and tried
to withdraw some stray fold of her garments from his grasp. He resisted;
he would not let her go. His heart was aching with his own trouble, and
with the consciousness of her loss--Angela's loss--all the suffering
that Richard's death would inflict upon these two women who had loved
him so devotedly. He yearned for one little word of comfort and
affection, which even in that terrible moment, a mother should have
known so well how to give. But he lay at that mother's feet in vain.

It was Angela who spoke first.

"Speak to him, mother," she said, tremblingly. "See how he suffers. It
was not his fault."

The tears ran down her pale cheeks unnoticed as she spoke. It was only
natural to Angela that her first words should be words of consolation to
another, not of sorrow for her own great l