"Will you see her, Blase?" asked Rosaline, as he stood quiet and silent with the news. "She looks so peaceful." Blase assented; and they went together into the death-chamber. Very peaceful. Yes: none could look more so. "Poor old lady!" spoke Blase. "I'm sure I feel very sorry: almost as though it was my own mother. Was she sensible to the last?" "Quite to the very last; and collected," replied Rosaline, suppressing a sob in her throat. "Mr. Frank Raynor called in the afternoon; and I know he saw that nothing more could be done for her, though he did not say so. She was very still after he left, lying with her eyes closed. When she opened them and saw me, she put up her hand for me to take it. 'I have been thinking about your father and that past trouble, dear,' she said. 'I am going to him: and what has never been cleared here will be made clear there.' They were nearly the last words she spoke." "It's almost a pity but it had been cleared up for her here," said Blase. "It might have set her uncertainty at rest, don't you see. Sometimes I had three parts of a mind to tell her. She'd have thought a little less of Mr. Frank Raynor if I had told." Rosaline, standing on one side the bed, cast a steady look on the young man, standing on the other. "Blase," she said, "I think the time has come for me to ask you what you mean. As you well know, it is not your first hint, by many, in regard to what you saw that fatal night at Trennach. I have wanted to set you right; but I was obliged to avoid the subject whilst my mother lived; for had the truth reached her she might have died of it." "Died of it! Set me right!" repeated Blase, gazing back at Rosaline. "By the words which you have allowed to escape you from time to time, I gather that you have believed my unfortunate father owed his death to Mr. Frank Raynor." "So he did," said Blase. "So he did _not_, Blase. It was I who killed my father." The assertion seemed to confound him. But for the emotion that Rosaline was struggling with, her impressive tones, and the dead woman lying there, across whom they spoke, Blase might have deemed she was essaying to deceive him, and accorded her no belief.