alone that it was nigh irresistible, and she grasped the back of
the chair as though material support might sustain her.

"Is he--dead?"

She was breathing hard.

"No," she said. "Not--not yet, They are waiting for the end."

"And you?" he asked in grave surprise, glancing at the door of the
Judge's room.

Then she remembered Clarence.

"I am waiting for my cousin," she said.

Even as she spoke she was with this man again at the Brinsmade gate.
Those had been her very words! Intuition told her that he, too, was
thinking of that time. Now he had found her at his desk, and, as if that
were not humiliation enough, with one of his books taken down and laid
open at his signature. Suffused, she groped for words to carry her on.

"I am waiting for Clarence, Mr. Brice. He was here, and is gone
somewhere."

He did not seem to take account of the speech. And his silence--goad
to indiscretion--pressed her to add:-- "You saved him, Mr. Brice. I--we
all--thank you so much. And that is not all I want to say. It is a poor
enough acknowledgment of what you did,--for we have not always treated
you well." Her voice faltered almost to faintness, as he raised his hand
in pained protest. But she continued: "I shall regard it as a debt I can
never repay. It is not likely that in my life to come I can ever help
you, but I shall pray for that opportunity."

He interrupted her.

"I did nothing, Miss Carvel, nothing that the most unfeeling man in our
army would not do. Nothing that I would not have done for the merest
stranger."

"You saved him for me," she said.

O fateful words that spoke of themselves! She turned away from him for
very shame, and yet she heard him saying:-- "Yes, I saved him for you."

His voice was in the very note of the sadness which has the strength
to suffer, to put aside the thought of self. A note to which her soul
responded with anguish when she turned to him with the natural cry of
woman.

"Oh, you ought not to have come here to-night. Why did you come? The
Doctor forbade it. The consequences may kill you."

"It does not matter much," he answered. "The Judge was dying."

"How did you know?"

"I guessed it,--because my mother had left me."

"Oh, you ought not to have come!" she said again.

"The Judge has been my benefactor," he answered quietly. "I could walk,
and it was my duty to come."

"You did not walk!" she gasped.

He smiled, "I had no carriage," he said.

With the instinct of h