A sob of relief and joy broke from her, as she recognised him and flung herself into his arms and clung to him. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh!” She could say no more at that moment. But the joy of it! To have at last a man to turn to, a man to lean upon, a man to look to! And still he could not grasp the position. “My God!” he repeated in wonder. “What, child, what are you doing here?” But before she could answer him, his eyes sank to the level of the couch, which the figures about it shaded from the scorching light. And he started—and stepped back. In a lower voice and a quavering tone he called upon his Maker. He was beginning to understand. “We had to bring her out,” she sobbed. “We had to bring her out. The house is on fire. See!” She pointed to the house beside Miss Sibson’s, from the upper windows of which smoke was beginning to curl and eddy. Men were pouring from the door below, carrying their booty and jostling others who sought to enter. “You have been here all day?” he asked, passing his hand over his brow. “Yes.” “All day? All day?” he repeated. “Yes.” He covered his eyes with his hand, while Mary, recalled by a touch from Miss Sibson, knelt beside her mother, to feel her pulse, to rub her hands, to make sure that life still lingered in the inanimate frame. He had not asked, he did not ask who it was over whom his daughter hung with so tender a solicitude. He did not even look at the cloaked figure. But the sidelong glance which at once sought and shunned, the quivering of his mouth, which his shaking fingers did not avail to hide, the agitation which unnerved a frame, erect but feeble, all betrayed his knowledge. And what must have been his thoughts, how poignant his reflections as he considered that there, there, enveloped in those shapeless wraps, there lay the bride whom he had wedded with hopes so high a score of years before! The mother of his child, the wife whom he had last seen in the pride of her beauty, the woman from whom he had been parted for sixteen years, and who through all those sixteen years had never been absent from his thoughts for an hour, nor ever been aught in them but an abiding, clinging, embittering memory—she lay there! What wonder, if the scene about them rolled away and he saw her again in the stately gardens at Stapylton, walking, smiling, talking, flirting, the gayest of the gay, the lightest of the butterflies, the admired of all? Or if his heart bled at the remembrance—at that remembrance and many another? Or again, what wonder if his mind went back to long hours of brooding in his sombre library, hours given up to the rehearsal of grave remonstrances, vain reproofs, bitter complaints, all destined to meet with defiance? And if his head sank lower, his hands trembled more senilely, his breast heaved at this picture of the irrevocable past?