l nice to you--once. But thank her for me--please.'

'She's here now, George, she brought me here. She wouldn't let me come
alone.'

'God bless her!' he said, under his breath. 'I'll see her--to-morrow.
Now go on talking. You won't mind if I go to sleep? They won't let you
stop here, dear. You'll be upstairs. But you'll come early--won't you?'

They gave him morphia, and he went to sleep under her eyes. Then the
night nurse came in, and the surgeon from the hospital opposite, with
Howson. And Cicely took Nelly away.

Cicely had made everything ready in the little bare room upstairs. But
when she had helped Nelly to undress, she did not linger.

'Knock on the wall, if you want me. It is only wood, I shall hear
directly.'

Nelly kissed her and she went. For nothing in her tender service that
day was Nelly more grateful to her.

Then Nelly put out her light, and drawing up the blind, she sat for long
staring into the moonlight night. The rain had stopped, but the wind was
high over the sea, which lay before her a tumbled mass of waves, not a
hundred yards away. To her right was the Casino, a subdued light shining
through the blinds of its glass verandahs, behind which she sometimes
saw figures passing--nurses and doctors on their various errands. Were
there men dying there to-night--like her George?

The anguish that held her, poor child, was no simple sorrow. Never--she
knew it doubly now--had she ceased to love her husband. She had told
Farrell the truth--'If George now were to come in at that door, there
would be no other man in the world for me!' And yet, while George was
dying, and at the very moment that he was asking for her, she had been
in Farrell's arms, and yielding to his kisses. George would never know;
but that only made her remorse the more torturing. She could never
confess to him--that indeed was her misery. He would die, and her
unfaith would stand between them for ever.

A cleverer, a more experienced, a more practical woman, in such a case,
would have found a hundred excuses and justifications for herself that
never occurred to Nelly Sarratt, to this young immature creature, in
whom the passionate love of her marriage had roused feelings and
emotions, which, when the man on whom they were spent was taken from
her, were still the master-light of all her seeing--still so strong and
absorbing, that, in her widowed state, they were like blind forces
searching unconsciously for some new support, so