that child?"

"Wh--wh--wh--whut? You the widder?" Clenk's eyes were starting from their
sockets as he gazed up at her from his crouching posture on the bench,
his head sunk between his shoulders, his hand with the untasted glass in
it trembling violently.

"An' ye say that ye too will stand by me? Then lemme tell it--lemme tell
it now. 'T was--what d'ye call that place?--I ain't familiar with them
parts. _Wait_"--as Bayne exclaimed inarticulately--"lemme think a minit."
He dropped his head on one of his hands, his arm, supported by the back
of the bench, upholding it. His slouched hat had fallen off on the stone
pavement, and his shock of gray hair moved in the soft breeze.

The moment's interval in the anguish of suspense seemed interminable to
the group. "Drink a little brandy," Bayne counselled, hoping to stimulate
his powers.

He evidently heard, and sought to obey. The hand holding the untasted
liquor quivered, the glass swayed, fell from his nerveless grasp, and
shivered to fragments on the stone pavement.

Bayne sprang to his side and lifted his head. Ah, a drear and ghastly
face it was, turned up to the gorgeous sunset, the gentle ambient air,
the happy, fleeting shadows of the homing birds.

"Has he fainted?" asked Lillian.

"The man is dead!" Bayne cried with a poignant intonation. "He is dead!
He is dead!"

For while they had waited for the word that had eluded him he had gone
out into the great wordless unknown. His failing strength had thwarted
his will. His spirit had given him the slip.

XIII.

Every appliance of resuscitation known to science was brought into use,
but in vain. No scrap of paper, no clue of identification, was found upon
the body. The three, bound together in such close ties of sympathy, were
stricken as with a new and appalling affliction. The burden was all the
heavier for that momentary lightening of a treacherous hope. For a time
Bayne could not reconcile himself to this new disaster. So overwhelming
indeed, so obvious, was its effect that Lillian, ever with her covetous
appropriation of every faculty, her grasping claim on every identity in
this sacred cause, feared that despair had at last overtaken him, and
that he would succumb and give over definitely the search. The idea
roused her to a sort of galvanic energy in promoting the project, and she
would continually formulate fantastic plans and suggest to him tenuous
theories wit