them. Alas! Alas! Though he saw it not, death
entered with them. At midnight there was the old, old cry of despair
and anguish, the hurrying for help, where no help was of avail, the
desolation of a terror creeping hour by hour closer to the
hearthstone.

The laird was stricken with a stony grief which was deaf to all
consolation. He wandered up and down wringing his hands, and crying
out at intervals like a man in mortal agony. Helen lay in a stupor
while the fever burned her young life away. She muttered constantly
the word "Colin;" and Tallisker, though he had no hope that Colin
would ever reach his sister, wrote for the young laird.

Just before the last she became clearly, almost radiantly conscious.
She would be alone with her father, and the old man, struggling
bravely with his grief, knelt down beside her. She whispered to him
that there was a paper in the jewel-box on her table. He went and got
it. It was a tiny scrap folded crosswise. "Read it, father, when I am
beyond all pain and grief. I shall trust you, dear." He could only bow
his head upon her hands and weep.

"Tallisker!" she whispered, and he rose softly and called him. The two
men stood together by her side.

"Is it well, my daughter?" said the dominie, with a tone of tender
triumph in his voice. "You fear not, Helen, the bonds of death?"

"I trust in those pierced hands which have broken the bonds of death.
Oh! the unspeakable riches!"

These were her last words. Tallisker prayed softly as the mystical
gray shadow stole over the fair, tranquil face. It was soon all over.

"She had outsoared the shadow of our night,
And that unrest which men misname delight."

The bridal robes were folded away, the bridegroom went back to his
regiment, the heartsore father tried to take up his life again. But it
seemed to him to have been broken in two by the blow; and besides
this, there was a little strip of paper which lay like a load upon his
heart. It was the paper he had taken from Helen's dying fingers, and
it contained her last request:

"Father, dear, dear father, whatever you intended to give me--I pray
you--give it to God's poor.

"HELEN."

CHAPTER VII.

The dominie had felt certain that Colin would answer his letter in
person, but after a long silence he received it back again. Colin had
left Rome, and left no trace behind him. The laird knew that Tallisker
had written, and he too had been hoping and expecting. But he received
t