lling on her that would kill her.

"Archie stood motionless, but he turned a kind of gray-white. 'Is it?'
was all he asked.

"I waited again--waited long enough to let them see that what I had to
tell was grave. 'It is, Archie,' I said then.

"'Is he--?' Archie began, but I saw he couldn't finish. In fact he
didn't need to finish, because Ena cried out again, 'He's dead!'

"Archie could only question me with his eyes, so that I said, 'I'm sorry
to have been the one to bring you the news--'

"I got no further than that when a kind of strangling moan came from Ena
and a sound as if she was falling. Archie ran into the bedroom, and the
first thing I heard was, 'Bessie, for God's sake come here!' When I got
there Ena was lying in a little tumbled heap beside the couch. She had
on her lilac kimono and could just as well have seen me as not, so I
knew that what we had said down-stairs had been true. They did want to
give us the cold shoulder.

"Well, you can imagine that it was all over with that. We had everything
we could do to bring Ena around and get her on the couch. It took the
longest time, and while we were doing it--before she could follow
anything we said--Archie asked me what I knew, and I told him. I was
glad to be able to do it in just that way, because I could break it up
and get it in by pieces, a fact at a time. There was so much for him to
do, too, that he couldn't give his whole mind to it, which was another
mercy.

"When I could leave Ena I slipped into the sitting-room, shutting the
door behind me, and letting Archie tell her what I had been able to tell
him. While he was doing that I scribbled a little note, saying that Len
and I were going to Garland's, where they would find us in case we could
do anything more to help them. Without waiting for him to come out of
the bedroom, I left the note on the table and went away."

In succeeding letters Mrs. Willoughby told how Archie had come to them
at Garland's, had insisted on their returning with him to the hotel in
Brook Street, and had installed them in a suite of rooms contiguous to
his own. Moreover, he clung to them, begging them not to leave him. It
was the most extraordinary turning of the tables Bessie had ever known.
He produced the impression of a man not only stunned, but terrified. If
the hand that had smitten Claude had been stretched right out of heaven
he could not have seemed more overawed. He was afraid--that was what it
amounted to.