Hour after hour they watched and ministered together, and hour by hour the lamp of life flared grimly low and lower. And after he had told everything--everything, everything that he had concealed in life--after John and Di had heard, in awed compassion and forgiveness, every word of the guilty secret which he had kept under lock and key so many years, at last the tide of remembrance ebbed away and life with it. Did he know them in the quiet hours that followed? Did he recognize them? They bent over him. They spoke to him gently, tenderly. Did he understand? They never knew. And so, in the grey of an April morning, poor Colonel Tempest, unconscious of death, which had had so many terrors for him in life, drifted tranquilly upon its tide from the human compassion that watched by him here, to the Infinite Pity beyond. CONCLUSION. "Where there are twa seeking there will be a finding." After John had taken Di back to London he returned to Brighton, and from thence to Overleigh, to arrange for the double funeral. He had not remembered to mention that he was coming, and in the dusk of a wet afternoon he walked up by the way of the wood, and let himself in at the little postern in the wall. He had not thought he should return to Overleigh again, yet here he was once more in the dim gallery, with its faint scent of _pot-pourri_, his hand as he passed stirring it from long habit. The pictures craned through the twilight to look at him. He stole quietly upstairs and along the garret gallery. The nursery door was open. A glow of light fell on Mitty's figure. What was she doing? John stopped short and looked at her, and, with a sudden recollection as of some previous existence, understood. Mitty was packing. Two large white grocery boxes were already closed and corded in one corner. John saw "Best Cubes" printed on them, and it dawned upon his slow masculine consciousness that those boxes were part of Mitty's luggage. Mitty was standing in the middle of the room, holding at arm's length a little red flannel dressing-gown, which knocked twenty years off John's age as he looked. "I shall take it," she said, half aloud. "It's wore as thin as thin behind; that and the open socks as I've mended and better-be-mended;" and she thrust them both hastily, as if for fear she should repent, into a tin box, out of which the battered head of John's old horse protruded. If there was one thing certain in this world, it was that the Noah's ark would not go in unless the horse came out. Mitty tried many ways, and was contemplating them with arms akimbo when John came in.