ng step, went toward the sofa and fell heavily upon
it, her face buried in her hands. A long breath that was almost a groan
broke from her, and then she lay very still, except that now and then
a violent shiver would run all along her frame. Poor Noel! He felt the
bitterness of the false position he had tried to occupy. If he had been
indeed her brother, this awful grief might have spent itself, to some
extent, in his arms. He felt that he was nothing to her, but his heart
was none the less soft toward her for that.

Thrusting the picture back into his pocket, he drew a chair near to her,
and sat down by her side. He wanted her to feel that he was there, in
case she should find it in her heart to turn to him for a help he did
not venture to intrude. It seemed a long while that they remained so,
but at last Christine sat up, turning upon him a face so strange and
terrible that he trembled at the look of it. Sorrow had seared it like a
blight. She had been lying upon a seam in the lounge and it had left a
red mark across her face. He thought it looked like the wound upon her
heart made visible.

"I can never see him again," she said. "I cannot go home. Oh God, I have
no home! It never was a home to me, except when my baby was in it. Oh,
my baby boy!--my baby boy!--my little child that loved and clung to me!
Oh, God was merciful to take you. My God, I see it now! I thank Thee, I
thank Thee, I thank Thee!"

She fell on her knees on the floor, and then she threw herself forward
on the couch, and hiding her face again shook from head to foot with
great, tearless sobs.

"Oh, I am so glad he is dead! It is so sweet to me to think it! I would
have had to look into his big, clear eyes that used to seem to read my
very heart, and think of this! Oh, if only I could go and lie beside my
baby, in the deep, still ground where the cruel eyes of men and women
could not see us, I would want no other home. I have been lonely and
miserable, lying in my bed at night, without him, and I have felt that
he missed and needed me, as I did him. Oh, if only God would let me go
to him, I would be willing to be put into his grave alive and wait for
death to come! It would be easier than life with this thing branded on
me."

"Branded on you! Oh, Christine, you must not say it. You will not be
branded; you will be, as you have always been, best and purest and
truest among women--to me at least. What have you ever been but an angel
of nobleness a