me tell you!" her voice was a sweet longing
wail. "When Donal came back all the world was full and shining and warm!
It was full. There was no loneliness anywhere. We wanted nothing but
each other. And when he was gone there was only emptiness! And I was not
alive and I could not think. I can scarcely think now."

"You'll begin to think soon, my lamb," Dowie whispered. "You've got
something to think of. After a while the emptiness won't be so big and
black."

She ventured it very carefully. Her wise soul knew that the Emptiness
must come first--the awful world-old Emptiness which for an
endless-seeming time nothing can fill-- And all smug preachers of the
claims of life and duty must be chary of approaching those who stand
desolate gazing into it.

"I could only _remember_," the broken heart-wringing voice went on. "And
it seemed as if the remembering was killing me over and over again-- It
is like that now. But in the Wood Lord Coombe said something
strange--which seemed to make me begin to think a little. Only it was
like beginning to try to write with a broken arm. I can't go on--I can
only think of Donal-- And be lonely--lonely--lonely."

The very words--the mere sound of them in her own ears made her voice
trail away into bitter helpless crying--which would not stop. It was the
awful weeping of utter woe and weakness whose convulsive sobs go on and
on until they almost cease to seem human sounds. Dowie's practical
knowledge told her what she had to face. This was what she had guessed
at when she had known that there had been crying in the night. Mere
soothing of the tenderest would not check it.

"I had been lonely--always-- And then the loneliness was gone. And
then--! If it had never gone--!"

"I know, my dear, I know," said Dowie watching her with practised,
anxious eye. And she went away for a few moments and came back with an
unobtrusive calming draught and coaxed her into taking it and sat down
and prayed as she held the little hands which unknowingly beat upon the
pillow. Something of her steadiness and love flowed from her through her
own warm restraining palms and something in her tender steady voice
spoke for and helped her--though it seemed long and long before the
cruelty of the storm had lessened and the shadow of a body under the
bed-clothes lay deadly still and the heavy eyelids closed as if they
would never lift again.

Dowie did not leave her for an hour or more but sat by her bedside and