Her mind had been wandering, surely, when she had that fancy about Lostwithiel, he told himself. It was something more than a dream. And then he remembered those long nights of delirium after her boy was born--and above all, that one night, when she had fancied herself at sea in a storm, when she had tried to fling herself overboard. He knew now what scene she had re-acted in that delirium, what the vision was which a mind distraught had conjured out of empty darkness. The priest left them before eleven o’clock, and Martin Disney sat with his wife till long after midnight--Tabitha waiting quietly in the next room--before he could persuade her to go to bed. Isola was more wakeful than usual--though her slumbers had been much broken of late--and there was a restlessness about her which impressed her husband as a sign of evil. “Is the storm over?” she asked, by-and-by, with her face turned towards the loggia and the starlight above the garden. “Yes, dearest, all is calm now.” “And the boy?” she said, suddenly looking up at the ceiling above which the child slept with his nurse. “He is asleep, of course.” “I hope so. I went upstairs at nine o’clock, while Father Rodwell was reading to you, and gave him my goodnight kiss. He was fast asleep.” “I wonder whether he will ever think of me when he is a man?” she said musingly. “Can you doubt that? You will be his most sacred memory.” “Ah,” she replied, “he will never know----” The sentence remained unfinished. “Will you carry me to my bed, Martin? The room begins to grow dark,” she whispered faintly. “I can hardly see your face.” He lifted the wasted form in his arms, and carried her with tenderest care into the next room, and to the pure white bed which had been made ready for her, the long net curtains parted, the coverlet turned down. He laid her there, as he had done many a night during that slow and monotonous journey towards the grave; but her gentle acknowledgment of his carefulness was wanting to-night. Her head sank upon the pillow, her pale lips parted with a fluttering sigh, and all was still. This was how the end came--suddenly, painlessly. She died like an infant falling asleep. * * * * * Colonel Disney laid his wife in the place she had loved, the cemetery under the shadow of the old Roman wall, in a verdant corner near Shelley’s grave. Burial follows death with dreadful swiftness in that southern land, and the earth closed over Isola before noon of the day after her death. Martin Disney waited to see the new-made grave covered with summer’s loveliest blossoms before he left the cemetery and went back to the house to which he had taken his fading wife in the radiant Italian springtime. He paced the desolate rooms, and wandered in and out between the drawing-room and the sunny bedroom, with its snowy curtained bed, and looked at this object and that with tear-dimmed eyes and an aching heart. * * * * *