n had
or had not been made to her own alarming experience of him. Her own
shock and confusion had been too great for accurate recollection.
Silence about him was to her thought the wisest course, and she had
remained silent.

She seemed to Gwen a wonderful old woman, this Granny Marrable. Her
untiring patience and strength, at her great age; her simple theism,
constantly in evidence; her resolute calmness in facing a second time
the harrowing grief of a twin sister's death--for that she saw it at
hand, Gwen was convinced--were surely the material of which heroism is
made, when heroism is in the making. To Gwen's thought, the miraculous
news that had been broken to her so suddenly might easily have
prostrated many a younger person, even without that mysterious unknown
factor, the twinship, the force of which could only be estimated by the
two concerned. As the old lady sat there at the supper-table, breaking
her resumptions of her sister's Australian tales by gaps of listening to
catch any sound from the bedroom, she seemed to Gwen a duplicate of the
old Mrs. Prichard of Sapps Court, spared by time or with some reserve of
constitutional energy, grey rather than white, resolute rather than
resigned. The different inflexion of voice helped Gwen against that
perplexing sense of her likeness to her twin, which would assert itself
whenever she became silent.

It was to fend this off, in such a pause, that she said:--"You are both
just eighty this year, Granny, are you not?"

"Eighty-one, my lady. When our clock strikes midnight Maisie will have
been eighty-one years in the world, and myself with but a few minutes to
make up the tale. My mother told me so when I was still too young to
understand, but I bore her words in mind. She was dead a year when my
brother dressed those little dolly figures in the mill. I mind that he
put it off, so we should not be in black for our mother. He died
himself, none so long after that."

The foolish lines of keeping up hope mechanically to the last did not
recommend themselves to Gwen. But she could trust herself to say, seeing
the strength on the old face before her:--"Oh, Granny, do not let us
despair too soon!" The phrase acknowledged Death, and did not choke her
like the sham.

"My lady, have you felt her feet?"

"No--are they so cold?"

Instead of replying. Granny Marrable rose and, passed into the bedroom.
Gwen, whose own speech had stopped her from hearing old Maisie's
half-u