you."

"No, I'm booked for my journey, you for yours. I hope you don't mind the
voyage."

Mr. Rawson exhaled a groan of helpless gratitude, appealing piteously
from so strange a windfall. "It's like the angel of the Lord who bids
people in the Bible to rise and flee!"

Searle had sunk back upon his pillow, quite used up; I led Mr. Rawson
back into the sitting-room, where in three words I proposed to him
a rough valuation of our friend's trinkets. He assented with perfect
good-breeding; they passed into my possession and a second bank-note
into his.

From the collapse into which this wondrous exercise of his imagination
had plunged him my charge then gave few signs of being likely to emerge.
He breathed, as he had said, and nothing more. The twilight deepened; I
lighted the night-lamp. The doctor sat silent and official at the foot
of the bed; I resumed my constant place near the head. Suddenly our
patient opened his eyes wide. "She'll not come," he murmured. "Amen!
she's an English sister." Five minutes passed; he started forward.
"She's come, she's here!" he confidently quavered. His words conveyed to
my mind so absolute an assurance that I lightly rose and passed into the
sitting-room. At the same moment, through the opposite door, the
servant introduced a lady. A lady, I say; for an instant she was simply
such--tall pale dressed in deep mourning. The next instant I had uttered
her name--"Miss Searle!" She looked ten years older.

She met me with both hands extended and an immense question in her
face. "He has just announced you," I said. And then with a fuller
consciousness of the change in her dress and countenance: "What has
happened?"

"Oh death, death!" she wailed. "You and I are left."

There came to me with her words a sickening shock, the sense of poetic
justice somehow cheated, defeated. "Your brother?" I panted.

She laid her hand on my arm and I felt its pressure deepen as she spoke.
"He was thrown from his horse in the park. He died on the spot. Six days
have passed. Six months!"

She accepted my support and a moment later we had entered the room and
approached the bedside, from which the doctor withdrew. Searle opened
his eyes and looked at her from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to make
out her mourning. "Already!" he cried audibly and with a smile, as I
felt, of pleasure.

She dropped on her knees and took his hand. "Not for you, cousin," she
whispered. "For my poor brother."

He start