h and rhythm,
mounting to her in a sonorous murmur, dully rising and falling. Karen
listened in indifference.

But suddenly there came another sound and this was sharp and near.

There was only one window in the little room; it was open, and it looked
out at the back of the house over a straggling garden set round with
trees and shrubberies. The sound was outside the window, below it and
approaching it, the strangest sound, scratching, cautious, deliberate.

Karen opened her eyes and fixed them on the window. The tree outside
hardly stirred against the blue spring sky. Someone was climbing up to
her window.

She felt no fear and little surprise. She wondered, placidly, fixing her
eyes upon the patterned square of blue and green. And upon this
background, like that of some old Italian picture, there rose the head
and shoulders of Mrs. Talcott.

Karen raised herself on her elbow and stared. The river stopped in its
gliding; the mists rolled away; the world rocked and swayed and settled
firmly into a solid, visible reality; Mrs. Talcott's face and her round
black straw hat and her black caped shoulders, hoisting themselves up to
the window-sill. Never in her life was she to forget the silhouette on
the sky and the branching tree, nor Mrs. Talcott's resolute, large, old,
face, nor the gaze that Mrs. Talcott's eyes fixed on her as she came.

Mrs. Talcott put her knee on the window-sill and then struggled for a
moment, her foot engaged in the last rung of the ladder; then she turned
and stepped down backwards into the room.

Karen, raised on her elbow, was trembling.

"Lay down, honey," said Mrs. Talcott, gently and gravely, as they looked
at each other; and, as she came towards the bed, Karen obeyed her and
joined her hands together. "Oh, will you come with us?" she breathed.
"Will you stay with me? I can live if you stay with me, Mrs.
Talcott--dear Mrs. Talcott."

She stretched out her hands to her, and Mrs. Talcott, sitting down on
the bed beside her, took her in her arms.

"You're all right, now, honey. I'm not going to leave you," she said,
stroking back Karen's hair.

Karen leaned her head against her breast, and closed her eyes.

"Listen, honey," said Mrs. Talcott, who spoke in low, careful tones: "I
want to ask you something. Do you love Franz Lippheim? Just answer me
quiet and easy now. I'm right here, and you're as safe as safe can be."

Karen, on Mrs. Talcott's breast, shook her head. "Oh, no, Mrs. T