This brought sister and aunt to his side, to find that Isabel had been with him from the first, watching him night and day. Then they shared the task with her, till the first rays of reason began to shine out of his eyes. "But where is she now? Why does she not come?" he said rather fretfully. "She left directly you seemed to be out of danger, Fred." "But how unkind. Why should she do that?" "Why, Fred--why?" said his sister gazing at him wonderingly. "Oh, brother, brother, you do not grasp all yet." Laura Chester was wrong; he did grasp it at that moment, for the past came back like a flash, and he uttered a low groan as he recalled the contents of that letter, the words seeming to stand out vividly before his eyes. From that hour his progress towards recovery was slower than before, and he lay thinking that the words contained in that letter were true--that it was good-bye for ever and that his life was hopelessly wrecked. The return of health and strength contradicted that, though, as a year passed away, and then another year, in the course of which time he learned that the discoveries in Highcombe Street had been forgotten by the crowd, other social sensations having blurred them out. His own troubles had grown fainter, too, as the time wore on; but for two years he did not see Isabel again. Then they met one day by accident and another day not by accident, and by slow degrees, while tortured by shame and remorse at having, as he told himself, thrown everything worth living for away, he learned what a weak, foolish creature a woman who has once truly loved a man can be, and said, as many of us say-- "What a miserable desert this world would be if there was no forgiveness for such a sin as mine!" The End.