rely to me. You know how you
always can trust me. Look, here's my hand. Just one tiny step and you
will touch it. I know you feel ill, darling Mother. You won't any, any
more, once you touch my hand. But I can't come any nearer, dearest. You
must. You--. Ah, brave, beloved Mother--now!"

He heard Effie's voice, "Oh, she's dead! She's dead!"

Dead? He stared upon her dead face. Where was gone that mask? Whence had
come this glory? That inhabitant of this her body, in act of going had
looked back, and its look had done this thing. It had closed the door
upon a ruined house, and looked, and left a temple. It had departed from
beneath a mask, and looked, and that which had been masked now was
beatified.

Young Perch!

V

In the morning a mysterious man with a large white face, crooked
spectacles and a crooked tie, and a suggestion of thinking all the time
of something else, or of nothing at all, mysteriously drifted into the
house, drifted about it with apparent complete aimlessness of purpose,
and presently showed himself to Sabre as about to drift out of it again.
This was the doctor, a stranger, one of those new faces which the war,
removing the old, was everywhere introducing, and possessed of a
mysterious and astounding faculty of absorbing, resolving, and
subjugating all matters without visibly attending to any matter. "Leave
everything to me," it was all he seemed to say. He did nothing yet
everything seemed to come to his hand with the nicety and exactness of a
drawing-room conjurer. He bewildered Sabre.

His car left and returned during his brief visit. Sabre, who had thought
him upstairs, and who had a hundred perplexities to inquire of him,
found him in the hall absorbed in adjusting the weights of a
grandfather's clock.

He remarked to Sabre, "I thought you'd gone. You'd better get off and
get a bath and some breakfast. Nothing you can do here. Leave everything
to me."

"But, look here, I can't leave--"

"That's all right. Just leave everything to me. I'm taking Miss Bright
back to my wife for breakfast and a rest. After lunch I'll run her to
her home. She can't stay here. Have you any idea how this thing hooks
on?"

"But what about--"

The extraordinary man seemed to know everything before it was said.
"That's all right. I've sent for a woman and her daughter. Leave
everything to me. Here's the car. Here they are."

Two women appeared.

"But about--"

"Yes, that's all right. The poor ol