od near her. They had evidently
been talking together earnestly when he burst in upon them; they had not
even heard his approach. Both girls seemed excited, charged with portent
beyond the ordinary. They stood staring at Ishmael, mouths open.

"What is the meaning of it?" he shouted at them. "How is it you are both
in here like this, and with--that left in the passage? Has everyone gone
mad? What has happened?"

"Oh, maister!" ejaculated one of them, "havn't 'ee heard?"

"Heard what? I come in and find my poor dog--" He broke off; he could
not bring himself to utter the words that would tell what he had come
upon.

"Missus got out of the bed and found someone had hung the dog, and her
was took all of a sudden, and the doctor is overstairs weth her now,"
the girl informed him; and through all her commiseration the ghoulish
delight of her kind in misfortune showed. "She'm mortal bad, they do
say," she added.

Ishmael stood still where he was. His mind had been subjected to too
violent an onslaught for this fresh news to break upon it with much
added weight. Dimly aware that the standard of these other people would
expect him hardly to notice the death of his dog when his wife was in
danger, he did not speak again of Wanda, but all his loyalty of
affection went out to the furry body lying helplessly in the deserted
parlour, as all his sense of horror had been absorbed by the finding of
it. After that everything seemed to him more or less dreamlike; an
impersonal pity and anxiety he felt and deeply, but it was as though he
stood and looked on at Phoebe from outside of himself as much as from
outside of her.

He was first stirred to active realisation by the expression of her
physical pain; when he heard her cries, rising and falling, piercing the
calm autumn night, he went into the garden and tried to stop his ears,
but the thin poignancy of those cries still rang in them. He went back
to the parlour, and picking up the body of poor Wanda, carried it out to
a spot of the garden where the sun fell the longest, and there, beneath
a rambler rose bush, began to dig her grave furiously. Suddenly it
struck him as rather awful that it should be a grave he was busy over at
such a moment, and he stopped. Then his deadly sense of proportion that
never would leave him alone for long told him how little it really
mattered, and he went on with his work. Wanda was covered by a smoothed
patch of earth--he wanted no mound to bring t