aid, struggling to speak in
her customary tone. "Maybe I'd better go first."

The hushed intimacy of the tragedy suddenly brought the man and the woman
very close together.

She led the way and he followed with his helpless burden. The form he bore
was not heavy. In fact, it was so fragile that it seemed impossible that
it could harbor so much venom and hatred.

Ellen Webster was, after all, nothing but an old, old woman. Perhaps, he
reflected, in a wave of regret, he should have realized this and made
allowance for it. Then a reaction from his tense emotion swept over him,
and he thought with amusement how angry she would be should she suddenly
regain consciousness and find herself within his grasp.

But she did not come to herself, and when he laid her on the bed that Lucy
had prepared, she was still as unmindful of his touch as she would have
been had the spirit within her really taken flight.

Martin did not linger now. His decision was made.

"I'll step over home an' get the other horse an' team, an' fetch the
doctor back," he said quietly.

"I wish you would."

She did not thank him, accepting the favor with the simplicity of a weaker
nature that leans unabashed on a stronger. Her dependence and her
confession of it thrilled him with pleasure. She heard him creep
cautiously down over the stairs and go out at the side door.

Then she turned her attention to making more comfortable the helpless
woman upon the bed. When at length there was nothing more she could do,
she sat down to wait the doctor's coming. The time dragged on. It seemed
an eternity before help came.

In the meantime Ellen lay immovable as she had done from the first, her
hard, sharp-cut features harder and more sharply defined in their pallor
than the girl had realized them to be. In the furrowed brow, the deep-set
eyes, the pitiless mouth there was not one gentle line which death could
borrow to soften the stamp with which revenge and bitterness had branded
her. So she would look in her coffin, Lucy thought with awe. Majesty might
come into her face in the last great moment; but it would be the majesty
of hate, not of love.

What a sad, sad ending to a life!

As the girl sat thinking of the friendless, isolated existence of the
woman before her, she wondered idly what her aunt would have been, if,
while her nature was still plastic, she had married and sacrificed her ego
in years of service for others. Ah, she would never then have co