After his draft we laid
'im on the sofy, and there he is now, sleepin' the sleep of the just.
Just step up and see him; do, now. He is in a state of comus, and not
expectit to get out of it for two hours."

"The young--lady--will go up," says Sir James, feeling, somehow, as if
he has insulted Clarissa by calling her "a young lady." "She would
like" (in a confidential tone that wins on the stout landlady) "to see
him alone, just at first."

"Just so," says Mrs. Goodbody, with a broad wink; and Clarissa is
forthwith shown up-stairs, and told to open the first door she comes
to.

"And you," says Mrs. Goodbody to Sir James, "will please just to step
in 'ere and wait for her, while I see about the chicking broth!"

"What a charming room!" says Sir James, hypocritically; whereupon the
good woman, being intensely flattered, makes her exit with as much
grace as circumstances and her size will permit.

Clarissa opening the door with a beating heart, finds herself in a
pretty, carefully-shaded room, at the farther end of which, on a sofa,
Horace lies calmly sleeping. He is more altered than even her worst
fears had imagined, and as she bends over him she marks, with quick
grief, how thin and worn and haggard he has grown.

The blue veins stand out upon his nerveless hands. Tenderly, with the
very softest touch, she closes her own fingers over his. Gently she
brushes back the disordered hair from his flushed forehead, and then,
with a quick accession of coloring, stoops to lay a kiss upon the
cheek of the man who is to be her husband in one short month.

A hand laid upon her shoulder startles and deters her from her
purpose. It is a light, gentle touch, but firm and decided and
evidently meant to prevent her from giving the caress. Quickly raising
herself, Clarissa draws back, and, turning her head, sees----

Who is it? Has time rolled backwards? A small, light, gray-clad figure
stands before her, a figure only too well remembered! The brown hair
brushed back from the white temples with the old Quakerish neatness,
the dove-like eyes, the sensitive lips, cannot be mistaken. Clarissa
raises her hands to her eyes to shut out the sight.

Oh! not that! Anything but that! Not Ruth Annersley!

A faint sick feeling overcomes her; involuntarily she lays a hand upon
the back of a chair near her, to steady herself; while Ruth stands
opposite to her, with fingers convulsively clinched, and dilated
nostrils, and eyes dark with horr