to me again." Old Maisie clung closer to the hand she
held, and trembled so that Phoebe stopped, saying:--"Ought I to tell?"

"Yes--go on! You know, dear, I know it all--half know it--but I cannot
hold it for long--it goes. Go on!"

"He wrote to me--he wrote to you--saying, we were dead. O God, forgive
him for his cruelty! Why, oh why?" She fixed her eyes on her sister, and
seemed to wait for an answer to the question.

And yet she wondered in her heart when the answer came. It came with a
light that broke through the speaker's face, a sound of relief in her
words:--"It was his love for me, Phoebe dearest--it was his love for me!
He would not have me go from him to my sister in England, even for the
time I would have wanted, to see her again. The fault was mine, dear,
the fault was mine! I was ever on at him--plaguing--plaguing him to
spare me for the time. Oh--'twas I that did it!"

Let her believe it! Let her see a merit in it for the man she loved!
That was Phoebe's thought.

"He was always good to me," Maisie continued. "He never thought of what
might come of it. All his desire was I should not leave him. Oh,
Phoebe, Phoebe, if only I might have died there and then, out in the
Colony!"

"To see me no more? Not this once? I thank God that has spared ye to me,
Maisie, just but to hear your voice and hold your hand and kiss your
face. If I be dreaming, I be dreaming. Only I would not wake, not I. But
I can scarce bear myself for the wonderment of it all. How could you
come back alone--my Maisie, alone and old!--back again to England--in a
ship--through the storms?" For all the mind that Granny Marrable had
left after the bewildering shock was aching to know more.

Old Maisie was almost too weak for anything like curiosity about the
past; she simply submitted--acquiesced. This was her sister, not dead by
some miracle. When in dreams we see again the departed, do we speak of
the interim? Surely never? Neither did Maisie. She could not even look
forward to knowing more. She could talk on, with no difficulty of
speech--indeed, seemed talkative. She could reply now to Phoebe's
question:--"But, my dear, I was not alone, nor old. I was not much older
than my Ruth that I have found.... Where is she?--she is not gone?" She
looked round, frightened, trying to raise herself.

"She is gone away to sleep. It is night, you know. There goes the clock.
Four. She will come again.... But, oh, Maisie, was it as long ago as
that