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to be left alone, and her martyrdom was the facing of a world of eyes that dared not show their shrinking. As he thought of her, her youth and loveliness stretched on such a rack, he groaned. How could he leave her? And like the swing of a pendulum came the opposing question, How could he be near her?

He fell suddenly asleep, thought and feeling snapped through their long tension.

He was awakened from heavy dreams, where dull bells rang and under a heavy sky he and a great host of others, their horses panting beneath them, hunted a white animal that sometimes ran and sometimes rose in the air, passing swiftly and smoothly through great open spaces, or, as smoothly, as swiftly, through the high branches of dark and lonely woods. As he rode his heart was torn by pity for the quarry and by horror of its whiteness, its swiftness, its soft uprising in the air.

A hand was on his shoulder, and as he struggled with his dream, striving to cry, "Madeline!" a voice said, "Wake! Wake!"

He opened his eyes, to a stranger dream, It almost seemed, but in its strangeness a relief, a rapture—a delicious rapture of relief. His room was filled with a dim, rosy light, and near him a figure muffled in white shook his shoulder and cried to him.

"The house is on fire!" said Madeline Tristram.

It was not the soft, monotonous ghost-voice, nor the voice of impassive courtesy that he had known; this voice, curt, decisive, seemed never to have known fear or an empty courtesy. "Hurry! The stairs are on fire. There is no other escape."

While he sprang up and dashed on his dressing-gown, she tore a blanket from the bed and drenched it with water from the jugs. He found her fastening, with swift, steady fingers, a wet handkerchief across his mouth and nose.

"And now the blanket," she commanded. "Over your head; well around you. I have mine." He caught her hand to his breast. "We must not hesitate. To run through is our only chance," she said. He threw open the door. A cavern of flame was below them; the stairs were obliterated.

"Too late—too late. The window!" she cried.

Maverley had caught her back as she stood for an instant transfixed. He closed the door upon the coming death.

"My God! you have killed yourself," he said. "You came up those stairs? Through that fire? Alone?"

"Yes—yes! The window!"

"The window is impossible. This turret room looks on a paved court; it is one of the highest in the house. I always have it; I liked the view."

He was not conscious of the bitter irony of this fatal liking, merely explaining the fatality; it paralyzed all action: but he crossed with her to the window, looking out, down at the sheer, impossible blackness. Over the dark woods and hills the sky arched, softly red. The little lake shone like a rosy jewel. A cloud of sparks trailed overhead, drifting slowly downward.

"My God! my God!" Maverley repeated, "you have killed yourself." Unconsciously he still held her close. "Why did you do it?"

From the blackness beneath, the sky overhead, he looked back at her, seeing her clearly now in the growing, ominous brightness. Her hair fell, a heavy curtain of black, about her illumined face, over her shoulders, over his hands that held her,—tragic, melancholy hair; but in the illumined face was more than tragedy. She had seen their doom. She had accepted it. Her eyes looked into his deeply, fearlessly, with a noble gravity.

"I came to save you if I could. I came to die near you if you had to die."

"Madeline," he said, "did you know that I loved you?"

"I did not know."

"You came because you loved me?"

"Yes, yes," she gently said, leaning her face upon his breast. Softly, almost in whispers, as though their words raced with a pursuer in the dark, they spoke, their faces hidden from each other.

"I have loved you from the moment that I understood—from before then, perhaps," Maverley was saying.

"And I loved you, and knew you found me horrible. In all my life I have never been so afraid as when I heard your voice this morning. Nobody has ever loved me. Everybody has shuddered at me ever since I was born; before I was born my mother shuddered at me."

"A curse was on you. You only needed to see that some one was not afraid."

"Yes, yes; I have longed for one kind face. I have fought, fought, determining