Mrs. Zant still kept her place; but there was another change. Little by
little, her eyes recovered their natural living expression--then slowly
closed. She tottered backward from the table, and lifted her hands
wildly, as if to grasp at something which might support her. Mr. Rayburn
hurried to her before she fell--lifted her in his arms--and carried her
out of the room.

One of the servants met them in the hall. He sent her for a carriage.
In a quarter of an hour more, Mrs. Zant was safe under his care at the
hotel.

XIII.

THAT night a note, written by the housekeeper, was delivered to Mrs.
Zant.

"The doctors give little hope. The paralytic stroke is spreading upward
to his face. If death spares him, he will live a helpless man. I shall
take care of him to the last. As for you--forget him."

Mrs. Zant gave the note to Mr. Rayburn.

"Read it, and destroy it," she said. "It is written in ignorance of the
terrible truth."

He obeyed--and looked at her in silence, waiting to hear more. She hid
her face. The few words she had addressed to him, after a struggle with
herself, fell slowly and reluctantly from her lips.

She said: "No mortal hand held the hands of John Zant. The guardian
spirit was with me. The promised protection was with me. I know it. I
wish to know no more."

Having spoken, she rose to retire. He opened the door for her, seeing
that she needed rest in her own room.

Left by himself, he began to consider the prospect that was before him
in the future. How was he to regard the woman who had just left him?
As a poor creature weakened by disease, the victim of her own
nervous delusion? or as the chosen object of a supernatural
revelation--unparalleled by any similar revelation that he had heard of,
or had found recorded in books? His first discovery of the place that
she really held in his estimation dawned on his mind, when he felt
himself recoiling from the conclusion which presented her to his pity,
and yielding to the nobler conviction which felt with her faith, and
raised her to a place apart among other women.

XIV.

THEY left St. Sallins the next day.

Arrived at the end of the journey, Lucy held fast by Mrs. Zant's hand.
Tears were rising in the child's eyes.

"Are we to bid her good-by?" she said sadly to her father.

He seemed to be unwilling to trust himself to speak; he only said:

"My dear, ask her yourself."

But the result justified him. Lucy was happy again.

MIS