ickly
as possible. Her old nurse, an elderly spinster, to whom Mary was the
first consideration in existence, had brought her a cup of soup and some
toast. It had seemed to Jane the right thing to do.

Mary thanked her and drank a little. She passed through a mental phase
as of dreaming--a sensation familiar in sleep; but she knew that this
was not a sleeping but a waking experience. She waited for her father,
yet dreaded to hear him return. She thought of human footsteps and the
difference between them. She remembered that she would never hear Tom's
long stride again.

It often broke into a run, she remembered, as he approached her; and
she would often run toward him, too--to banish the space that separated
them. She blamed herself bitterly that she had decreed to sleep in her
old nursery. She had loved it so, and the small bed that had held her
from childhood; yet, if she had slept with him, this might not have
happened.

"To think that only a wall separated us!" she kept saying to herself.
"And I sleeping and dreaming of him, and he dying only a few yards
away."

Death was no disaster for Tom, so the doctor had said. What worthless
wisdom! And perhaps not even wisdom. Who knows what a disaster death
may be? And who would ever know what he had felt at the end, or what his
mind had suffered if time had been given him to understand that he was
going to die? She worked herself into agony, lost self-control at last
and wept, with Jane Bond's arms round her.

"And I was so troubled, because I thought he had been called back to his
ship!" she said.

"He's called to a better place than a ship, dear love," sobbed Jane.

After they left her, Sir Walter and Dr. Mannering had entered the Grey
Room for a moment and, standing there, spoke together.

"I have a strange consciousness that I am living over the past again,"
declared the physician. "Things were just so when that poor woman, Nurse
Forrester--you remember."

"Yes. I felt the same when Caunter was breaking open the door. I faced
the worst from the beginning, for the moment I heard what he had done,
I somehow knew that my unfortunate son-in-law was dead. I directly
negatived his suggestion last night, and never dreamed that he would
have gone on with it when he knew my wish."

"Doubtless he did not realize how much in earnest you were on the
subject. This may well prove as impossible to understand as the nurse's
death. I do not say it will; but I suspect it wil