isoners, fast bound: she in misery, he
only in iron.

The door opened gently and Magdalen came in in a long white wrapper,
with a candle in her hand.

She put down the candle and came towards Fay. She did not speak. Her
face quivered a little. She bent over the huddled figure in the window
seat, and with a great tenderness drew it into her arms. For a moment
Fay yielded to the comfort of the close encircling arms, and leaned her
head against Magdalen's breast.

Then she wrenched herself free, and pushed her sister violently from
her.

"Why do you come creeping in like that?" she said fiercely. "You only
come to spy upon me."

Magdalen did not speak. She had withdrawn a pace, and stood looking at
her sister, her face as white as her night-gown.

Fay turned her tear-drenched face to the window and looked fixedly out.
There was a faint movement in the room. When she looked round Magdalen
was gone.

Fay, worn with two years of partially eluded suffering, restless with
pain, often sick at heart, was at last nearing the last ditch:--but she
had not reached it yet.

Many more useless tears, many more nights of anguish, many more days of
sullen despair still lay between her and that last refuge.

CHAPTER XIII

Il n'y a point de passe vide ou pauvre, il n'y a point
d'evenements miserables, il n'y a que des evenements
miserablement accueillis.--MAETERLINCK.

Magdalen went back to her own room, and set down her candle on the
dressing-table with a hand that trembled a little.

"I ought not to have gone," she said half aloud, "and yet--I knew she
was awake and in trouble. And she nearly spoke to me to-day. I
thought--perhaps at last--the time had come like it did with Mother. But
I was wrong. I ought not to have gone."

The large room which had been her mother's, the elder Fay's, seemed
to-night crowded with ghostly memories: awakened by the thought of the
younger Fay sobbing in the room at the end of the passage.

In this room, in that bed, the elder Fay had died eighteen years ago.

How like the mother the child had become who had been named after her.

Magdalen saw again in memory the poor pretty apathetic mother who had
taken so long to die; a grey-haired Fay, timid as the present Fay,
unwise, inconsequent, blind as Fay, feebly unselfish, as alas! Fay was
not.

There is in human nature a forlorn impulse, to which Mrs. Bellairs had
yielded, to speak at last when the great silence draws n