He lay propped up with pillows, and the beautiful woman known to Fergusson as Mrs. Stanforth, stood beside him, his head drawn close to her breast. Her arm was about him, and he had turned his face against her, as a child lays its face against its mother, his dim eyes fixed upon her with a look of almost passionate adoration. With her free hand she stroked back the damp hair from his forehead, now and again wiping away the drops of sweat with a filmy handkerchief she held, and her eyes watched him with a hungry, loving look, that brought a lump into Fergusson's throat. "To know that a woman will look into one's dying face with such a look as that, is worth everything," the thought flashed unbidden into his mind, as he stepped softly up to the bed, and laid a hand upon the patient's wrist. The dying man looked at him with a faint smile of welcome, but the woman did not move or glance at him. Her whole soul was wrapped up in the man she loved, the man who was passing so fast away from her, into the silent land. "Nearly--done---doctor," the man in the bed panted out, the smile still lingering on his face. "I--thought--I should have been afraid--but--now--the time has come--there--is--no fear." His eyes left Fergusson, and lifted themselves to the face bending over him. "You--rest--me--sweetheart," he said. "I--am never afraid--when you are--with me." As his eyes met hers, his smile acquired a strange radiance, and Fergusson all at once recognised the charm of the man--that magnetic something--which had won and held the love of such a woman as Margaret. Until this moment the reason for the weak man's hold over this woman had baffled, almost annoyed, Denis. Now, in a flash of illumination, it seemed to him he understood it. He had seen at once that the dying man was already beyond all human aid; he gave him an injection of strychnine, but there was nothing else he could do, to ward off that dread visitor, whose feet had already crossed the threshold. Yet he felt that his presence in the house, if not in the room, would be a help to the woman so soon to be left desolate; and, having spoken a word or two of comfort and cheer, in that strong voice of his which carried comfort in its very tones, he moved away to the adjoining room.