en he got into disgrace, she, by the scheming of Elizabeth, used
secretly to carry bread-and-honey and apples to his bedroom. And she
wiped her eyes, the good, plain-looking sister Mary, saying over and
over again,

"Poor Fred!" She never thought of him, like the world, as "Major
Frederick Harper," but only as "Poor Fred!"

Several times Agatha stole up-stairs to the door of the room which
enclosed the sorrow-mystery of the house. It was always shut, but she
could hear Nathanael's voice within--his soft, kind voice, talking
quietly by the bedside.

"I never see anything like 'un," said the coachman's wife, who sat
without the door. "He do manage th' Squire just as the poor dear
Missus did. He do talk just like his mother." And that was evidently the
perfection of everything in the old woman's eyes.

Agatha sat down beside her on the staircase, listening to the wind
without, that swept fiercely over the hollow in which Kingcombe Holm
lay, as if ready to bear away on its pinions a departing soul. It was
an awful night to die in. Agatha listened, sensitive to every one of its
terrors. But above them all--above the shadow of coming death, fear of
the future, anxiety in the present--rose one thought--the thought of her
husband.

It gave her no pain--it gave her no joy--yet there it was, a visible
image sitting strong and calm in the half-lighted chamber of her heart,
every feeling of which crept to its feet and lay there, like priestesses
in the twilight before a veiled god.

Nathanael at last opened the door. He looked like one who has struggled
and conquered not only with things without, but things within. His face
had all the pallor, but likewise all the peace of victory. Agatha rose
to meet him.

"Have you been waiting for me this long while? Good child!" And he
smiled, but solemnly, as with an inward sense of the Presence which
makes all things equal--softens all asperities and calms all passions.

"Do you know where my brother is?" asked Nathanael.

"Down-stairs, with the rest."

"Will you go and fetch him?"

Agatha looked up at her husband half incredulously. "Have you then
succeeded? Is all made right?"

"Yes."

"Oh, how good--how good you are!" She grasped his hands and kissed them,
her eyes floating in tears; then, lest he should be displeased, ran
quickly away.

Miss Valery met her at the stairhead, coming from the gallery where were
Elizabeth's rooms. They exchanged the usual question, "How is