he cried back, cheerily; 'are you all right?'

"'Yes, dear. Good-night.'

"Her little, worn-out frame dropped back upon the bed, and the next thing
I remember is snatching up a pillow, and holding it tight-pressed against
Jeanie's face for fear the sound of her sobs should penetrate into the
next room; and afterwards we both got out, somehow, by the other door,
and rushed downstairs, and clung to each other in the back kitchen.

"How we two women managed to keep up the deceit, as, for three whole
days, we did, I shall never myself know. Jeanie sat in the room where
her dead sister, from its head to its sticking-up feet, lay outlined
under the white sheet; and I stayed beside the living man, and told lies
and acted lies, till I took a joy in them, and had to guard against the
danger of over-elaborating them.

"He wondered at what he thought my 'new merry mood,' and I told him it
was because of my delight that his wife was out of danger; and then I
went on for the pure devilment of the thing, and told him that a week
ago, when we had let him think his wife was growing stronger, we had been
deceiving him; that, as a matter of fact, she was at that time in great
peril, and I had been in hourly alarm concerning her, but that now the
strain was over, and she was safe; and I dropped down by the foot of the
bed, and burst into a fit of laughter, and had to clutch hold of the
bedstead to keep myself from rolling on the floor.

"He had started up in bed with a wild white face when Jeanie had first
answered him from the other room, though the sisters' voices had been so
uncannily alike that I had never been able to distinguish one from the
other at any time. I told him the slight change was the result of the
fever, that his own voice also was changed a little, and that such was
always the case with a person recovering from a long illness. To guide
his thoughts away from the real clue, I told him Jeanie had broken down
with the long work, and that, the need for her being past, I had packed
her off into the country for a short rest. That afternoon we concocted a
letter to him, and I watched Jeanie's eyes with a towel in my hand while
she wrote it, so that no tears should fall on it, and that night she
travelled twenty miles down the Great Western line to post it, returning
by the next up-train.

"No suspicion of the truth ever occurred to him, and the doctor helped us
out with our deception; yet his pulse, which day by da