after her vanishing guest with eyes wide with dismay.

On the doorstep the clergyman and the lady encountered. He was panting
as one, all unaccustomed to such exercise, who had run. There was a
look of famished eagerness in his eyes, the unhealthy pallor of his
face was beaded with drops of sweat.

"They told me--at the office--a telegram had been sent," he said.

She snatched it from her pocket and put it in his hand. "I kept it from
her," she said. "Take it, and let me go."

And yet she could not go.

His shaking fingers had torn open the envelope, had clutched the
enclosure. It wavered so, that, standing behind him, she put her arms
round his arms--tall woman as she was--her hands over his, and helped
him to steady it.

"Read it," he said to her; "I can't--I can't see."

So she read aloud to him, in a voice that rose on a note of triumph and
finished in a sob, the single line of the message!

"Not on board the _Doughty_. Tell mother all right."

Mrs Jones, coming to the dining-room door, looked out for one instant
on her husband, apparently clutched in Mrs Macmichel's embrace. In the
next, the lady was speeding with her long stride down the path to the
gate; the clergyman had staggered into a hall chair, a succession of
sounds, something between sobs and hiccoughs, issuing from his throat.

"My dear, has she hurt you?" his wife cried excitedly. "She is
mad--quite mad, I am sure!"

* * * * *

Her husband, catching sight of Mrs Macmichel's face as she entered,
followed her upstairs to her room. She was lying, dressed as she was,
on her bed, with her face hidden.

"My dear, what is the matter? What have you been doing with yourself?"
he asked.

She had been to the Rectory, to call on the Joneses, she told him.

"Well?"

"The _Doughty_ has gone down. All on board lost."

"So I hear. Well?"

"It was their son's ship."

"Well?"

"Freddy's." She sat up and laughed across the sob in her throat. "You
stupid! I am crying because Freddy did not go down in the _Doughty_,"
she said.

A NERVE CURE

"_Well_, what a place!" Julia cried.

I had come to it because of an urgent need of change, because it was by
the sea, because it was cheap, because the advertisement had caught my
eye at a moment when I was weary of vainly protesting that I wished to
go nowhere except to bed.

"TO LET, during the months of November and December, a six-roomed
cott