onlight to
Dover, realising for the first time, as he leant back alone in his
compartment, the full meaning of the news which had hurried him off. All
his tender affection for his sister, and all his stifling sense of
something unlucky and untoward in his own life, which had been so strong
in him during the past two months, combined to rouse in him the blackest
fears, the most hopeless despondency. Marie dead,--what would the world
hold for him! Books, thought, ideas--were they enough? Could a man live
by them if all else were gone? For the first time Kendal felt a doubt
which seemed to shake his nature to its depths.

During the journey his thoughts dwelt in a dull sore way upon the
past. He saw Marie in her childhood, in her youth, in her rich
maturity. He remembered her in the schoolroom spending all her spare
time over contrivances of one kind or another for his amusement. He
had a vision of her going out with their mother on the night of her
first ball, and pitying him for being left behind. He saw her tender
face bending over the death-bed of their father, and through a hundred
incidents and memories--all beautiful, all intertwined with that lovely
self-forgetfulness which was characteristic of her, his mind travelled
down to an evening scarcely a month before, when her affection had once
more stood, a frail warm barrier, between him and the full bitterness of
a great renunciation. Oh Marie, Marie!

It was still dark when he reached Paris, and the gray winter light was
only just dawning when he stopped at the door of his brother-in-law's
house in one of the new streets near the Champs Elysees. M. de
Chateauvieux was standing on the stairs, his smoothly-shaven, clear-cut
face drawn and haggard, and a stoop in his broad shoulders which Kendal
had never noticed before. Kendal sprang up the steps and wrung his hand.
M. de Chateauvieux shook his head almost with a groan, in answer to the
brother's inquiry of eye and lip, and led the way upstairs into the
forsaken _salon_, which looked as empty and comfortless as though its
mistress had been gone from it years instead of days. Arrived there, the
two men standing opposite to each other in the streak of dull light made
by the hasty withdrawal of a curtain, Paul said, speaking in a whisper,
with dry lips:

'There is no hope--the pain is gone; you would think she was better,
but the doctors say she will just lie there as she is lying now
till--till--the end.'

Kendal s