too!"

"What is it?" I asked vacantly.

For answer he pushed the paper into my hands, and with his thumb-nail
pointed to a column headed "TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN A THEATRE."

"An' to think," he continued reflectively, "as how I saw her wi' my
own eyes but three nights back--an' actin' so pretty, too! Lord!
It made me cry like any sucking child: beautiful it was--just
beau-ti-ful! Here's a story to tell my missus!"

I took the paper and read--

"TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN A THEATRE. SUICIDE OF A FAMOUS ACTRESS.--
Last evening, the performance of the new and popular tragedy,
_Francesca_, at the Coliseum, was interrupted by a scene
perhaps the most awful that has ever been presented to the
play-going public. A sinister fate seems to have pursued this
play from the outset. It will be within the memory of all that
its young and gifted author was, on the very night of its
production, struck down suddenly in the street by an unknown
hand which the police have not yet succeeded in tracing.
Last night's tragedy was even more terrible. Clarissa Lambert,
whose name--"

But I wanted to read no more. To the countryman's astonishment the
paper slipped from my listless fingers, and once more my gaze turned
to the carriage window. On we tore through the snow that raced
horizontally by the pane, through the white and peaceful country--
homeward. Homeward to welcome whom? Whom but the man now sitting,
it might be, within a foot of me? To my heart I hugged the thought
of him, sitting there and gloating over the morrow.

The morrow! Somehow my own horizon did not stretch as far: it was
bounded by to-night. Before to-morrow one of us two should be a dead
man; perhaps both. So best: the world with its loves and hatreds
would end to-night. So westward we sped in the grey light beneath
which the snowy fields gleamed unnaturally--westward while the sun
above showed only as a crimson ball, an orb of blood, travelling
westward too. At Bristol it glared through a murky veil of smoke, at
Exeter and through the frozen pastures and leafless woodlands of
Devon dropped swiftly towards my goal, beckoning with blood-stained
hand across the sky. Past the angry sea we tore, and then again into
the whitened fields now growing dim in the twilight. In the carriage
the talk was unceasing--talk of home, of expectant friends, of
Christmas meetings and festivities. Every station was thronged, a