ton.
It was during her brief engagement to Colonel Crofton, and the latter's
sister, without being over cordial, had been quite pleasant to the
startlingly pretty little woman, who had made such a fool of her brother.

But at the time of Colonel Crofton's death, his sister had been truly
kind. She had telegraphed L200 to her sister-in-law from Italy, and this
sum of ready money had been very useful during that tragic week--and even
afterwards, for the insurance people had made a certain amount of fuss
after Colonel Crofton's sad suicide, "while of unsound mind," and this
had caused a disagreeable delay.

The new tenant of The Trellis House had her lonely dinner brought in to
her on a tray, and then, perhaps rather too soon--for she was not much of
a reader, and there was nothing to while away the time--she went upstairs
to her pleasant, cosy bedroom, and so to bed.

But, try as she might, she found it impossible to fall asleep; for what
seemed to her hours she lay wide awake, tossing this way and that. At
last she got up, and, drawing aside the chintz curtain across one of the
windows, she looked out. The window was open, and in the eerily bright
moonlight the upper part of the hill on which Beechfield village lay
seemed spread before her. There were twinkling lights in many of the
windows--doubtless groups of happy, cheerful people behind them. She
felt horribly lonely and depressed as well as wide awake to-night.

In her short, healthy life, Enid Crofton had only had one attack of
insomnia. During the ten days that had followed her husband's sudden
death--for the inquest had had to be put off for a day or two--she
had hardly slept at all, and the doctor who had been so kind a friend
during that awful time, had had to give her a strong narcotic. To his
astonishment it had had no effect. She had felt as if she were going
mad--the effect, so he had told her afterwards, of the awful shock she
had had.

To-night she wondered with a kind of terror whether that terrible
sleeplessness which had ended by making her feel almost lightheaded was
coming back.

She turned away from the window, and, getting into bed again, tried to
compose her limbs into absolute repose, as the doctor had advised her to
do. And then, just as she was mercifully going to sleep, there floated
in, through the open window, a variant on a doggerel song she had last
heard in Egypt:--

"The angels sing-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling,
They've got the g