which demanded all his
courage, as he turned toward her; "it all had to come out, somehow.
It is the end, now."

She had brought with her a cup of water. Now she handed it to him
without comment. His hand trembled as he took it.

"You saw that--?" He nodded toward the ruins. All she did was to
nod, in silence. "Yes, I saw you come out--with--that--in your
arms."

"Who--what--do you suppose it was?"

"I don't know." Then, suddenly,--"Tell me. Tell me! _Was it
she_?"

"Send them away!" he said to her after a time. She turned, and
those who stood about seemed to catch the wish upon her face. They
fell back for a space, silent, or talking in low tones.

"Come," he said.

He led her a pace or so, about the scanty wall of shrubbery. He
pulled back a bit of old and faded silk, a woman's garment of years
ago, from the face of that something which lay there, on a tiny
cot, scarce larger than a child's bed.

It was the face of a woman grown, yet of a strangely vague and
childlike look. The figure, never very large, was thin and
shrunken unbelievably. The features, waxy-white, were mercifully
spared by the flames which had licked at the shielding hands and
arms that had borne her hither. Yet they seemed even more thin,
more wax-like, more unreal, than had their pallor come by merciful
death. Death? Ah, here was written death through years. Life,
full, red-blooded, abounding, luxuriant, riotous, never had
animated this pallid form, or else had long years since abandoned
it. This was but the husk of a human being, clinging beyond its
appointed time to this world, so cruel and so kind.

They stood and gazed, solemnly, for a time. The hands of Josephine
St. Auban were raised in the sign of her religion. Her lips moved
in some swift prayer. She could hear the short, hard breathing of
the man who stood near her, grimed, blistered, disfigured, in his
effort to bring away into the light for a time at least this
specter, so long set apart from all the usual ways of life.

"She has been there for years," he said, at last, thickly. "We
kept her, I kept her, here for her sake. In this country it would
be a sort of disgrace for any--any--feeble--person, you know, to go
to an institution. Those are our graves over yonder in the yard.
You see them? Well, here was our asylum. We kept our secrets.

"She was this way for more than ten years. She was hurt in an
accident--her spine. She withered away. Her