sty
moonlight, when the sharp beam of a taper smote Ray's sleepless eyes,
and he saw Vivia at last standing before him. Over her wrapper clung the
old shawl whose snowy web was sown with broidery of linnaea-bells, green
vine and rosy blossom. Round her shoulders fell her shadowy hair.
Through her slender fingers the redness of the flame played, and on her
cheek a hectic coming and going like the broad beat and flush of an
artery left it whiter than the spectral moonlight on the pane. She took
away her hand, and let the illumination fall full upon his face,--a face
haggard as a dead man's.

"Ray," she said, "where is Beltran?" Only silence replied to her. He lay
and stared up at her in a fixed and glassy glare. Breathless silence.
Then Ray groaned, and turned his face to the wall. Vivia blew out the
light.

* * * * *

The weeks crept away with the setting-in of the frosts. Little Jane's
heart was heavy for all the misery she saw about her, but she had no
time to make moan. Ray's amputated ankle was giving fresh trouble, and
after that was well over, he still kept his room, refusing food or fire,
and staring with hot, wakeful eyes at the cold ceiling. Vivia lingered,
subdued and pale, beside the hearth, doing any quiet piece of work that
came to hand; no one had seen her shed tears,--she had shown no
strenuous sorrow; on the night of Ray's return she had slept her first
unbroken sleep for months; her nerves, stretched so intensely and so
long, lay loosely now in their passionate reaction; some element more
interior than they saved her from prostration. She stayed there, sad and
still, no longer any sparkle or flush about her, but with a mildness so
unlike the Vivia of June that it had in it something infinitely
touching. She would have been glad to assist little Jane in her crowded
duties, yet succeeded only in being a hindrance; and learning a little
of broths and diet-drinks every day, she contented herself with sitting
silent and dreamy, and transforming old linen garments into bandages.
Mrs. Vennard, meanwhile, waited on her nephew and bewailed herself.

But for little Jane,--she had no time to bewail herself. She had all
these people, in fact, on her hands, and that with very limited means to
meet their necessities. It was true they need not experience actual
want,--but there was her store to be managed so that it should be at
once wholesome and varied, and the first thing to do was