easant
room where Miss Frost had her piano, her books, and her flowers. The
scandal was as unjust as most scandals are. Yet truly, all that
summer and autumn Miss Frost had a new and slightly aggressive
cheerfulness and humour. And Manchester House saw little of her,
comparatively.

And then, at the end of September, the young man was removed by his
Insurance Company to another district. And at the end of October set
in the most abominable and unbearable weather, deluges of rain and
north winds, cutting the tender, summer-unfolded people to pieces.
Miss Frost wilted at once. A silence came over her. She shuddered
when she had to leave the fire. She went in the morning to her room,
and stayed there all the day, in a hot, close atmosphere, shuddering
when her pupils brought the outside weather with them to her.

She was always subject to bronchitis. In November she had a bad
bronchitis cold. Then suddenly one morning she could not get up.
Alvina went in and found her semi-conscious.

The girl was almost mad. She flew to the rescue. She despatched her
father instantly for the doctor, she heaped the sticks in the
bedroom grate and made a bright fire, she brough hot milk and
brandy.

"Thank you, dear, thank you. It's a bronchial cold," whispered Miss
Frost hurriedly, trying to sip the milk. She could not. She didn't
want it.

"I've sent for the doctor," said Alvina, in her cool voice, wherein
none the less there rang the old hesitancy of sheer love.

Miss Frost lifted her eyes:

"There's no need," she said, and she smiled winsomely at Alvina.

It was pneumonia. Useless to talk of the distracted anguish of
Alvina during the next two days. She was so swift and sensitive in
her nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody.
In her silence her soul was alone with the soul of her darling. The
long semi-consciousness and the tearing pain of pneumonia, the
anguished sickness.

But sometimes the grey eyes would open and smile with delicate
winsomeness at Alvina, and Alvina smiled back, with a cheery,
answering winsomeness. But that costs something.

On the evening of the second day, Miss Frost got her hand from under
the bedclothes, and laid it on Alvina's hand. Alvina leaned down to
her.

"Everything is for you, my love," whispered Miss Frost, looking with
strange eyes on Alvina's face.

"Don't talk, Miss Frost," moaned Alvina.

"Everything is for you," murmured the sick woman--"except--" and she