e child?" questioned Piers.

"The child never breathed." Curt and cold came the answer. "I have had to
concentrate all my energies upon saving the mother's life, and--to be
open with you--I don't think I have succeeded. There is still a chance,
but--" He left the sentence unfinished.

They had reached the conservatory, and, entering, it was Piers who led
the way. His face, as they emerged into the library, was deathly, but he
was absolute master of himself.

"I believe there is a meal in the dining-room," he said. "Will you help
yourself while I go up?"

"No," said Wyndham briefly. "I am coming up with you."

He kept a hand upon Piers' arm all the way up the stairs, deliberately
restraining him, curbing the fevered impetuosity that urged him with a
grim insistence that would not yield an inch to any chafing for freedom.

He gave utterance to no further injunctions, but his manner was eloquent
of the urgent need for self-repression. When Piers entered his wife's
room, that room which he had not entered since the night of Ina's
wedding, his tread was catlike in its caution, and all the eagerness was
gone from his face.

Then only did the doctor's hand fall from him, so that he
advanced alone.

She was lying on one side of the great four-poster, straight and
motionless as a recumbent figure on a tomb. Her head was in deep shadow.
He could see her face only in vaguest outline.

Softly he approached, and Mrs. Lorimer, rising silently from a chair
by the bedside, made room for him. He sat down, sinking as it were
into a great abyss of silence, listening tensely, but hearing not so
much as a breath.

The doctor took up his stand at the foot of the bed. In the adjoining
room sat Lennox Tudor, watching ceaselessly, expectantly, it seemed to
Piers. Behind him moved a nurse, noiselessly intent upon polishing
something that flashed like silver every time it caught his eye.

Suddenly out of the silence there came a voice. "If I go down to
hell,--Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning--the wings
of the morning--" There came a pause, the difficult pause of
uncertainty--"the wings of the morning--" murmured the voice again.

Piers leaned upon the pillow. "Avery!" he said.

She turned as if some magic moved her. Her hands came out to him,
piteously weak and trembling. "Piers,--my darling!" she said.

He gathered the poor nerveless hands into a tight clasp, kissing them
passionately. He forgot the silent