to Something, something
was calling something to come back. The call was low, low and strange,
so regular and so unbroken and insistent, that it arrested, she knew not
what. Did it arrest the floating and the swaying in the enfolding sea?
Was the drifting slower? She could not rouse herself to think, she
wanted to go on. Did she no longer feel the water lapping against her
lip? Something was calling to Something still. Once, aeons ago, before
the white sea had borne her away, she would have understood.

"Emily, Emily, Emily!"

Yes, once she would have known what the sound meant. Once it had meant
something, a long time ago. It had even now disturbed the water, and
made it cease to lap so near her lip.

* * * * *

It was at this moment that one doctor had raised his eyes to the other,
and Lady Walderhurst had stirred.

When Walderhurst left his place beside his wife's bed, Dr. Warren went
with him to his room. He made him drink brandy and called his man to
him. "You must remember," he said, "that you are an invalid yourself."

"I believe," was the sole answer, given with an abstracted knitting of
the brows,--"I believe that in some mysterious way I have made her hear
me."

Dr. Warren looked grave. He was a deeply interested man. He felt that he
had been looking on at an almost incomprehensible thing.

"Yes," was his reply. "I believe that you have."

About an hour later Lord Walderhurst made his way downstairs to the room
in which Lady Maria Bayne sat. She still looked a hundred years old, but
her maid had redressed her toupee, and given her a handkerchief neither
damp nor tinted with rubbed-off rouge. She looked at her relative a
shade more leniently, but still addressed him with something of the
manner of a person undeservedly chained to a malefactor. Her irritation
was not modified by the circumstance that it was extremely difficult to
be definite in the expression of her condemnation of things which had
made her hideously uncomfortable. Having quite approved of his going to
India in the first place, it was not easy to go thoroughly into the
subject of the numerous reasons why a man of his years and
responsibilities ought to have realised that it was his duty to remain
at home and take care of his wife.

"Incredible as it seems," she snapped, "the doctors _think_ there is a
slight change, for the better."

"Yes," Walderhurst answered.

He leaned against the mantel and gaz