her strange ravings with a softly tuned hymn-her voice comes to me faintly as I write-and as I listen I suddenly miss that other wailing and delirious cry. For the first time in seven days and nights Blanche is quiet! Oh, thank God! If for but one moment her ravings are subdued she must be better! In spite of all I have dropped a tear on my miserable little letter; but I know, dearest Hortense, you will overlook this and send an early reply Your troubled friend,

to

ALICE MEREDITH."

As she replaced the letter in its envelope there were tears in Lady Hortense's eyes:

"I will do better than send a message. I will attend you in your vigils to-night, my noble, sweet friend," she said to herself, as she went slowly up the stairs-ah! how slowly, pausing ever and again to recover her breath.

As she bent with Anine over her trunks, intent with preparations for their early departure, the latter heard her singing tremulously to herself, while tears fell in and wet the folded finery which had come to be, like the balls and operas and feasts by which her existence was measured off, "only dross, only dross!" and while the girl understood not the words of her song, the sad sentiment thereof she felt instinctively, and ere she could check them her own tears were falling fast.

"Mon Dieu !" thought the sympathetic French girl as she had thought many times of late to herself, "what has come over my dear mistress to make her so changed from the Lady Hortense who brought me from my home in the Pyrenees not a year ago?"

CHAPTER XXIII

A

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

-Sterne.

LL day a fine drizzling mist had fallen, and at five o'clock, just as Lady Hortense and her maid reached their apartments in the heart of Boston, it commenced raining in torrents.

Sir Philip had not accompanied them to the city. He had stayed behind to see to the closing up of Maplehurst, and to impress the one servant, a negro man who was to remain to guard the premises, with his duties.

Ephriam was to sleep in the stable loft; and right zealously did Sir Philip guard against any possible access to the interior walls of Maplehurst and the egress of his prisoner, Monsieur Alphonse Favraud, from the tower thereof.

Every window was closely shut and barred; every door double-locked and bolted, and all the keys safely deposited in his own pockets. So, with his evil soul entirely at ease, Sir Philip now found himself rolling over the storm-rent highway toward the railroad station. He reached their town quarters at seven o'clock, and found

the rooms in profound quiet and darkness.

As he stood conjecturing, curiously rather than with any feeling of anxiety, upon Lady Hortense's unexplained absence from the nest which would have made hundreds of hearts sick with envy, she was closeted with Alice Meredith, crying with her, praying with her, condoling with her; for the crisis had come, and poor tired Blanche was lying in the adjoining room, her face void of all expression save that restful one which the Archangel bestows in saying, "Peace be still!" her breath, if coming at all, coming undiscerned, and her little transparent hands crossed over her breast in the stillness of marble.

Over her bent an anxious, white-faced mother, who gave to every breath she drew, a tear; who gave with every tear a whispered word to Him upon whose infinite mercy the fate of her darling hung; whose hearing ear and seeing eye alone divined whether this was "a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep," in Life or Death. Almost without a sound, save that doleful and monotonous one which the clock gave out, the leaden hours passed until it was night no longer.

It was that hour when all breathing nature is at its lowest tide; when prayers had ceased and tears had dried themselves in very exhaustion; when sobs and heart-throes had given place to a silence that scarcely pulsed, and when suspense

with its drooping pinions, one of hope, one of despair, seemed gradually to be sinking into lifelessness. Mrs. Meredith had not once changed her position at the bedside of her darling. The eyes which were riveted upon that still and peaceful face had grown so wild and hunted in their expression that to have glanced at her a stranger would have thought her intellect distorted. Over the bed leaned another formthat of good old Doctor Congrave, who had ministered to the Merediths through three generations.

He held to the lips of the sleeper a piece of silvered glass; and his palsied hand shook violently as he bent his grey head nearer and nearer to the pillow upon which rested the tangled golden head of his heart's dear "fosterchild" as he called the three lovely grandchildren of Marion, his once sweetheart, who was lying beneath her mossy marble slab at Charlestown-and the time seemed age-long in which he stooped there, his withered features quivering with latent emotion, his breath hushed and anxiety dimming his kindly eyes, ready at any moment to dissolve into tears of happiness or grief.

Mrs. Meredith sat with locked fingers and lips half parted, ready for the soul-staying or despairing cry that must soon come in answer to the pending verdict of that aged prophet bending there.

Oh! that silence was agonizing! At last the tension of her strained nerves gave way, causing her to cry out faintly, yet without uttering any rational word.

At the sound the doctor lifted his disengaged hand.

Surely that gesture was not born of despair!

Another moment passed; the next he looked up, and now there was a light in his face which transfigured it, making it like the face of a saint.

"She will live !" he faltered. Then as he walked over to the dawn-lit window to hide his emotion, Mrs. Meredith slipped down upon her knees beside the bed, burying her face in the coverlits, lest she should yield to the impulse to shriek out in the pain of that ecstasy which was beating its pinions wildly against her heart. Long she knelt there in sobbing prayer of thanksgiving; and all the shadows softly dispersed themselves from the room, leaving the "candle of understanding" to shed its tender light ahead of the spirit which was slowly winging its flight back from the arms of Death.

For many hours the invalid slumbered in the even respiration of perfect and dreamless sleep. When she awoke it was noon.

"Allie !" they heard her say. "I want Allie." She came, and the two sisters clasped hands and gazed long and silently into each other's faces.