did I tell you? I forget. I
should have gone--but for this. It is too much for her,--that life. It
will break her down. You can save her and cherish her--you will. It seems
as if I saw you--together!'

Then her eyes fell and she seemed to sleep--gently wandering now and
then, and mentioning in her dying dream names and places which made the
reality before them more and more terrible to the two hushed listeners,
so different were the associations they called up. Was this white
nerveless form, from which mind and breath were gently ebbing away, all
that fate had grudgingly left to them, for a few more agonised moments,
of the brilliant, high-bred woman who had been but yesterday the centre
of an almost European network of friendships and interests! Love, loss,
death,--oh, how unalterable is this essential content of life, embroider
it and adorn it as we may!

Kendal had been startled by her words about Isabel Bretherton. He had not
heard of any illness; it could hardly be serious, for he vaguely
remembered that in the newspapers he had tried to read on the journey his
eye had caught the familiar advertisement of the _Calliope_. It must have
happened while he was in Surrey. He vaguely speculated about it now and
then as he sat watching through the afternoon. But nothing seemed to
matter very much to him--nothing but Marie and the slow on-coming of
death.

At last when the wintry light was fading, when the lamps were being lit
outside, and the bustle of the street seemed to penetrate in little
intermittent waves of sound into the deep quiet of the room, Marie
Raised herself and, with a fluttering sigh, withdrew her hand softly from
her brother, and laid her arm round her husband's neck. He stooped to
her--kissed the sweet lips and the face on which the lines of middle age
had hardly settled--caught a wild alarm from her utter silence, called
the nurse and Kendal, and all was over.

CHAPTER IX

The morning of Marie's funeral was sunny but bitterly cold; it was one of
those days when autumn finally passes into winter, and the last memory of
the summer warmth vanishes from the air. It had been the saddest,
dreariest laying to rest. The widowed sister, of whom Marie had spoken in
her last hours, had been unable to come, and the two men had gone through
it all alone, helped only by the tearful, impulsive sympathy and the
practical energy of the maid who had been with Marie ever since her
marriage, and was as yet h