ith something in her
hand--a small book. She held it out to Ellesborough.

"The Superintendent asked my leave to go into her room--in case there was
anything which could help them. He brought me this. She had been writing
in it--He asked me to look at it. I did--just enough to see--that no one
had any right to it--but you. She wrote it I think about an hour before
you came. It was her last word."

"I have her letters also"--said Ellesborough, almost inaudibly, as he
took the book--"You brought it--you kind woman! You were her good
angel--God reward you!"

Then at last a convulsion of weeping showed in Janet's face. She laid her
hand in his, and went noiselessly away.

Ellesborough sat beside his dead love all night. The farm was peaceful
again after that rush of the Furies through it, which had left this wreck
behind. Rachel's diary and letter lay before him. They were as her still
living voice in his ears, and as the words sank into memory they pierced
through all the rigidities of a noble nature, rending and kneading as
they went. He recalled his own solitary hour of bitterness after her
letter reached him. The story it contained had gone very hard with him,
though never for one moment had he even in thought forsaken her. There
was some comfort in that. But the memory which upheld him, which
alone kept him from despair, was the memory of her face at the window,
the sense still lingering in his own physical pulses of her young
clinging life in his arms, of the fluttering of her poor heart against
his breast, the exquisite happiness of her kiss--the kiss which death cut
short.

No--he had not failed her. That was all he had to live by. And without
it, it seemed to him, he could not have endured to live.

* * * * *

The two girls had sobbed themselves to sleep at last. But Janet did not
sleep. Tears came naturally as the hours went by--tears and the agonized
relief of prayer to one for whom prayer was a daily need of the soul. And
in the early morning there flooded in upon her a strange consciousness of
Rachel's spirit in hers--a strange suspicion that after all the gods had
not wrought so hardly with Rachel. A few days before she had attended the
funeral in the village church, of a young wife just happily married, who
had died in three days, of virulent influenza. Never had the words of the
Anglican service pleased her so little. What mockery--what fulsome
mockery--to thank God bec