The night has reached the dreariest of her little hours, that one that seems equally remote from the comfortable shores of the gone day and the coming one. The clocks have just struck two, and Peggy kneels on, still reiterating that monotonous prayer that God will take her Prue gently. To her ears, though not to her senses, come the noises of the night; come also noises that do not rightly belong to the province of the night, that are rather akin to the noises of the day: the sound, for instance, of wheels outside upon the lonely road, a sound that does not die away, gradually muffled and fading into the distance, but that ceases suddenly on the air--ceases, only to be succeeded by the noise of a vague, subdued stir in the house itself. But Peggy kneels on. The only noise that she heeds is that of the beckoning rose-branch that calls continually, 'Come, come!' She has buried her face in the bed-clothes, praying always; and as she lifts it again she becomes aware that in the doorway, left ajar to give Prue more air and ease in breathing, some one is standing, some one standing at the dead of the night, looking in upon her. But still she kneels on. She is quite past fear. Is she wandering, like Prue? Is it some heavenly messenger that has come out of pure pity to her help? If it be so, it wears the homely human form, the form of one with whom she once sat under a hawthorn bower, with her happy head upon his breast. As her solemn, haggard eyes meet his, he advances into the room, and kneels down beside her. They exchange no word. Their hands meet in no greeting; only they kneel side by side, until the morning. And at morning, when the first dawn-streak makes gray the chinks of the window-shutters, Prue, true to her infallible instinct, wakes up out of her trance; and, opening her eyes, cries with a loud, clear voice: 'Is it morning? Then there is another day gone. Forty days gone--forty days!' and so, lifting her face to Peggy to be kissed, as she has done all her life, before addressing herself to sleep, she closes her eyes, and turns her face on the pillow with a satisfied sigh; and on that satisfied sigh her soul slips away. Speak softly, for Prue is asleep--asleep as Franky Harborough sleeps, as all they sleep, the time of whose waking is the secret of the Lord God Omnipotent. * * * * *