"Please come at once. He is dying." There was no address, and the only signature was the one letter "M," but Fergusson at once understood what the message portended. The car, hurriedly ordered, was soon waiting for him at the front door; and, telling the man he would drive himself, the doctor glided quickly away in the direction of the lonely house in the valley. "Shall I discover anything of the mystery belonging to the house?" he wondered, as he sped along the dark country roads, his own powerful lamps throwing a stream of light upon the road ahead; "or will the secret, whatever it is, die with that unfortunate man? Whatever he has done or been--and he has either done or been something out of the common, and something not very commendable--I am prepared to swear his crimes were crimes of weakness, not of wickedness. The man is weak through and through, and why that wonderful woman has poured out such a wealth of love upon him, is one of the problems of--womanhood." He smiled as his meditations reached this point, and once again his thoughts flew back to that picture which had haunted them earlier in the evening, the picture of Baba's mother--fair, sweet, and dainty. "Would she--be ready to love through good and ill--as that other woman had done?" he reflected; "would she be ready to act as a prop? or must she find someone to look up to, and depend upon?" and thinking these things, he drew up before the high wall and the green door, before which a lantern flung a feeble light upon the surrounding blackness. Elizabeth admitted him; her face looked very worn, her eyes were heavy with want of sleep. "He took a bad turn two hours ago," she said, in answer to the doctor's question; "he's going fast, and I can't get her to leave him, though it is killing her, too." "It would only make her worse to try and take her away from him now," Fergusson said gently, knowing the good woman's devotion to her mistress, hearing the little shake in her voice as she spoke of Margaret; "if--the end has come, it will not be long; he has no strength to fight a long fight." "_Strength?_" the servant muttered, a curious contempt in her accents; "you couldn't name him and the word strength in the same breath. There! I've no business to talk like that of one who's dying, but--give me a strong man, give them me strong all the time--I can't do with them _weak_." Fergusson made no reply. He saw that the woman, overwrought with long watching and anxiety, was temporarily deprived of her normal reticence and taciturnity, and he recognised that her outburst owed its origin to her great love for her mistress, and to that natural antagonism which a strong character is apt to feel towards the weak. Handing her his coat, he passed rapidly along the corridor to the room, with which he was now familiar; and, going in softly, saw at a glance that the sick man in the bed was drawing very near to the Valley of the Shadow.