id not seem conscious of her presence but
presently she turned her head. There was a faintly bewildered look in
her eyes.

"I don't know why--when I look at the edge where the hill seems to
end--it always seems as if there might be something coming from the
place we can't see--" she said in a helpless-sounding voice. "We can
only see the sky behind as if the world ended there. But I feel as if
something might be coming from the other side. The horizon always looks
like that--now. There must be so much--where there seems to be nothing
more. I want to go."

She tried to smile a little as though at her own childish fancifulness
but suddenly a heavy shining tear fell on her hand. And her head dropped
and she murmured, "I'm sorry, Dowie," as if it were a fault.

The Macaurs watched her from afar with their own special order of silent
interest. But the sight of the slowly flitting and each day frailer
young body began to move them even to the length of low-uttered
expression of fear and pity.

"Some days she fair frights me passing by so slow and thin in her bit
black dress," Maggy said. "She minds me o' a lost birdie fluttering
about wi' a broken wing. She's gey young she is, to be a widow
woman--left like that."

The doctor came up the moor road every day and talked more to Dowie than
to his patient. As the weeks went by he could not sanely be hopeful.
Dowie's brave face seemed to have lost some of its colour at times. She
asked eager questions but his answers did not teach her any new thing.
Yet he was of a modern school.

"There was a time, Mrs. Dowson," he said, "when a doctor believed--or
thought he believed--that healing was carried in bottles. For thinking
men that time has passed. I know very little more of such a case as this
than you know yourself. You are practical and kind and watchful. You are
doing all that can be done. So am I. But I am sorry to say that it seems
as if only a sort of miracle--! If--as you said once--she would 'wake
up'--there would be an added chance."

"Yes, sir," Dowie answered. "If she would. But it seems as if her mind
has stopped thinking about things that are to come. You see it in her
face. She can only remember. The days are nothing but dreams to her."

Dowie had written weekly letters to Lord Coombe in accordance with his
request. She wrote a good clear hand and her method was as clear as her
calligraphy. He invariably gathered from her what he most desired to
know and learn