indness?"

Una looked on her curiously, and half frightened, and then the odd smile
stole over her face like a gleam of moonlight.

"My poor Alice, what have you to do with it?" she whispered.

"And why do you talk of sleeping no more with me?" said Alice.

"Why? Alice dear--no why--no reason--only a knowledge that it must be
so, or Una will die."

"Die, Una darling!--what can you mean?"

"Yes, sweet Alice, die, indeed. We must all die some time, you know,
or--or undergo a change; and my time is near--_very_ near--unless I
sleep apart from you."

"Indeed, Una, sweetheart, I think you _are_ ill, but not near death."

"Una knows what you think, wise Alice--but she's not mad--on the
contrary, she's wiser than other folks."

"She's sadder and stranger too," said Alice, tenderly.

"Knowledge is sorrow," answered Una, and she looked across the room
through her golden hair which she was combing--and through the window,
beyond which lay the tops of the great trees, and the still foliage of
the glen in the misty moonlight.

"'Tis enough, Alice dear; it must be so. The bed must move hence, or
Una's bed will be low enough ere long. See, it shan't be far though,
only into that small room."

She pointed to an inner room or closet opening from that in which they
lay. The walls of the building were hugely thick, and there were double
doors of oak between the chambers, and Alice thought, with a sigh, how
completely separated they were going to be.

However she offered no opposition. The change was made, and the girls
for the first time since childhood lay in separate chambers. A few
nights afterwards Alice awoke late in the night from a dreadful dream,
in which the sinister figure which she and her father had encountered in
their ramble round the castle walls, bore a principal part.

When she awoke there were still in her ears the sounds which had mingled
in her dream. They were the notes of a deep, ringing, bass voice rising
from the glen beneath the castle walls--something between humming and
singing--listlessly unequal and intermittent, like the melody of a man
whiling away the hours over his work. While she was wondering at this
unwonted minstrelsy, there came a silence, and--could she believe her
ears?--it certainly was Una's clear low contralto--softly singing a bar
or two from the window. Then once more silence--and then again the
strange manly voice, faintly chaunting from the leafy abyss.

With a strange wild