complexion and
the strange, grey eyes.

"I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath," he thought
with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and
Molly came in. She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual
unmoved, impersonal voice.

"The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up;
the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case. I must rouse
him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again.
After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything
you like to him."

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour passed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in
almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased. Then she
added abruptly--

"Do you mind telling me your name?"

"My name? Molyneux."

"Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?"

"I am his cousin."

"I have been at Groombridge." But the priest felt that the tone was not
in the least more friendly.

"Moloney won't suffer now," she went on, turning towards the door, "and
I think he will be conscious for a time."

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off. With
the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to
interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of
her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of
revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move
when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who
suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work
of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of
unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of
perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the
inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then she
hesitated.

What would go on in the next room? She was anxious now to know more
about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux's
face. If he had only known this man before she could have understood it.
But how could there be this passion of affection, this intensity of
feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no
longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no
great loss to those he left? She had seen a strange intensity of
reverence in