She met me with both hands extended and an immense question in her face. “He has just announced you,” I said. And then with a fuller consciousness of the change in her dress and countenance: “What has happened?” “Oh death, death!” she wailed. “You and I are left.” There came to me with her words a sickening shock, the sense of poetic justice somehow cheated, defeated. “Your brother?” I panted. She laid her hand on my arm and I felt its pressure deepen as she spoke. “He was thrown from his horse in the park. He died on the spot. Six days have passed. Six months!” She accepted my support and a moment later we had entered the room and approached the bedside, from which the doctor withdrew. Searle opened his eyes and looked at her from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to make out her mourning. “Already!” he cried audibly and with a smile, as I felt, of pleasure. She dropped on her knees and took his hand. “Not for you, cousin,” she whispered. “For my poor brother.” He started, in all his deathly longitude, as with a galvanic shock. “Dead! _He_ dead! Life itself!” And then after a moment and with a slight rising inflexion: “You’re free?” “Free, cousin. Too sadly free. And now--_now_--with what use for freedom?” He looked steadily into her eyes, dark in the heavy shadow of her musty mourning-veil. “For me wear colours!” In a moment more death had come, the doctor had silently attested it, and she had burst into sobs. We buried him in the little churchyard in which he had expressed the wish to lie; beneath one of the blackest and widest of English yews and the little tower than which none in all England has a softer and hoarier grey. A year has passed; Miss Searle, I believe, has begun to wear colours.