should come to
counteract their bewilderment, and to extinguish for the time the
conflagration of a thousand questions--whys, whens, and wherefores
innumerable--in their overburdened minds. Visible fever in the delicate
frame, to which it seemed the slightest shock might mean death, was a
summons to them to put aside every possible thought but that of
preserving what Time had spared so long, though Chance had been so cruel
an oppressor. It would be the cruellest stroke of all that she should be
thus strangely restored to them, only to be snatched away in an hour.

Presently she seemed quieter; the fever came in gusts, and rose and
fell. She had once or twice seemed almost incoherent, but it passed
away. Meanwhile Granny Marrable's memory of that madman or criminal, who
had at least known the woman he claimed as his mother well enough to be
mystified by her twin sister, rankled in her mind, and made it harder
and harder for her to postpone speech about him. She would not tell the
incident--she was clear of _that_--but would it harm Maisie to talk of
him? She asked herself the question the next time her sister referred to
him, and could not refrain from letting her speech about him finish.

It came of her mind drifting back to that crazy notion of an evil spirit
wandering to seek a home; as the hermit-crab, dispossessed of one shell,
goes in search of another. After a lull which had looked for a moment
like coming sleep, she said with an astonishing calmness:--"But do you
not see, Phoebe dear, do you not see how good his father must have been,
to do no worse than he did? See what the devil that possessed him could
do with Ralph--my youngest, he was; Isaac died--a good boy, quite a good
boy, till I lost his father! Oh--see what he came to do!"

"He ... he was sent to prison, was he not?" After saying it, old Phoebe
was afraid she might have to tell the whole tale of how she knew it.
But she need not have feared. Old Maisie was in a kind of dreamland,
only half-cognisant of what was going on about her.

Her faint voice wandered on. "I was not thinking of that. That was
nothing! He stole some money, and it cost him dear.... No!--it was worse
than that--a bad thing!... It was _not_ the girl's fault.... Emma was a
good girl...."

Granny Marrable was injudicious. But it was an automatic want of
judgment, bred of mind-strain. She could not help saying:--"Was that
Emma Drax?" For the name, which she had heard from the convict