e sat down, feeling her limbs were deserting
her, and every scrap of color left her face. Indeed, she looked so
flabby and lifeless that Phillis was alarmed and flew to her
assistance; only Mr. Cheyne waved her aside rather impatiently.

"Let her be; she is all right. She knows me, you see: so I cannot be
so much altered. Barby," he went on, in a coaxing voice, as he knelt
beside her and chafed her hands, "you thought I was an impostor, and
were coming to threaten me: were you not? But now you see Miss
Challoner was in the right. Have you not got a word for me? Won't you
talk to me about Magdalene? We have got to prepare her, you know."

Then, as he spoke his wife's name, and she remembered her sacred
charge, the faithful creature suddenly fell on his neck in piteous
weeping.

"Oh, the bonnie face," she wept, "that has grown so old, with the
sorrow and the gray hair! My dear, this will just kill her with joy,
after all her years of bitter widowhood." And then she cried again,
and stroked his face as though he were a child, and then wrung her
hands for pity at the changes she saw. "It is the same face, and yet
not the same," she said, by and by. "I knew the look of your eyes, my
bonnie man, for all they were so piercing with sadness. But what have
they done to you, Herbert?--for it might be your own ghost,--so thin;
and yet you are brown, too; and your hair!" And she touched the gray
locks over the temples with tender fluttering fingers.

"Magdalene never liked gray hairs," he responded, with a sigh. "She is
as beautiful as ever, I hear; but I have not caught a glimpse of her.
Tell me, Barby,--for I have grown timorous with sorrow,--will she hate
the sight of such a miserable scarecrow?"

"My dear! hate the sight of her own husband, who is given back to her
from the dead? Ay, I have much to hear. Why did you never write to us,
Herbert? But there! you have all that to explain to her by and by."

"Yes; and you must tell me about the children,--my little Janie," he
returned, in a choked voice.

"Ah, the dear angels! But, Herbert, you must be careful. Nobody speaks
of them to Magdalene, unless she does herself. You are impetuous, my
dear; and Magdalene--well, she has not been herself since you left
her. It is pining, grief, and the dead weight of loss that has ailed
her being childless and widowed at once. There, there! just so. We
must be tender of her, poor dear! and things will soon come right."

"You need not fe