without a word, without even a sob, and when he had come
to the end she sat there silent still, as if turned to stone. The
stillness grew so terrible that Mark could bear no more.

'Speak to me, Mabel,' he cried in his agony, 'for God's sake, speak to
me!'

She rose, supporting herself with one trembling hand; even in the
firelight her face was deathly pale. 'Take me to him first,' she said,
and the voice was that of a different woman, 'after that I will speak
to you.'

'To Vincent?' he asked, half stupefied by what he was suffering. 'Not
to-night, Mabel, you must not!'

'I must,' she replied; 'if you will not take me I shall go
alone--quick, let us lose no time!'

He went out into the main road and hailed a cab, as he had done often
enough before for one of their journeys to dinner or the theatre; when
he returned Mabel was already standing cloaked and hooded at the open
door.

'Tell him to drive fast--fast,' she said feverishly, as he helped her
into the hansom, and she did not open her lips again till it stopped.

He glanced at her face now and then, when the shop-lights revealed her
profile as she lay back in her corner; it was pale and set, her eyes
were strained, but she had shed no tears; he sat there and recalled
the merry journeys they had had together, side by side, on evenings
like this, when he had been sorry the drive should ever end--how long
this one was!

The cab reached Cambridge Terrace at last. Mark instinctively looked
at the upper windows of the house--they were all dark. 'Stay here,
till I have asked,' he said to Mabel before he got out, 'we may--we
may be too late.'

* * * * *

Vincent had been moved to his sleeping-room, where he was sitting in
his arm-chair; the trained nurse who had been engaged to wait upon him
had left him for a while, the light was lowered, and he was lying
still in the dreamy exhaustion which was becoming more and more his
normal state.

He had received his death-warrant some months before; the harassing
struggles against blight and climate in Ceylon, the succession of
illnesses which had followed them, and the excitement and anxiety that
he underwent on his return, had ended in an affection of the heart,
which, by the time he thought it sufficiently serious to need advice,
was past all cure.

He had heard the verdict calmly, for he had little to make him in love
with life, but while the book in which he had already begun to