in my hand, feeling indeed half dead, and yet with my mind
painfully alive. I began to wonder if I had gone asleep, and was
the victim of a nightmare. No such thing. I wish it had only been a
nightmare. A mouse ran out along the dresser and jumped on to the floor,
making quite a crash in the silence.

What was in the basket? I feared to look, and yet some power within
me forced me to it. I drew near to the table and stood for a moment
listening to the sound of my own heart. Then I stretched out my hand and
slowly raised the lid of the basket.

"I could not give you my life, so I have brought you my death!" Those
were her words. What could she mean--what could it all mean? I must know
or I would go mad. There it lay, whatever it was, wrapped up in linen.

Ah, heaven help me! It was a small bleached human skull!

A dream! After all, only a dream by the fire, but what a dream! And I am
to be married to-morrow.

_Can_ I be married to-morrow?

BARBARA WHO CAME BACK

CHAPTER I

THE RECTORY BLIND

This is the tale of Barbara, Barbara who came back to save a soul alive.

The Reverend Septimus Walrond was returning from a professional visit to
a distant cottage of his remote and straggling parish upon the coast of
East Anglia. His errand had been sad, to baptise the dying infant of a
fisherman, which just as the rate was finished wailed once feebly and
expired in his arms. The Reverend Septimus was weeping over the sorrows
of the world. Tears ran down his white but rounded face, for he was
stout of habit, and fell upon his clerical coat that was green with age
and threadbare with use. Although the evening was so cold he held his
broad-brimmed hat in his hand, and the wind from the moaning sea tossed
his snow-white hair. He was talking to himself, as was his fashion on
these lonely walks.

"I think that fresh milk would have saved that child," he said, "but
how was poor Thomas to buy fresh milk at fourpence a quart? Laid up for
three months as he has been and with six children, how was he to buy
fresh milk? I ought to have given it to him. I could have done without
these new boots till spring, damp feet don't matter to an old man. But I
thought of my own comfort--the son that doth so easily beset me--and so
many to clothe and feed at home and poor Barbara, my darling Barbara,
hanging between life and death."

He sobbed and wiped away his tears with the back of his hand, then began
to pray, stil