The stranger turned his wrapt scrutiny of herself into a keen and crafty attention of her words. He repeated them after her, with a significant pause after each clause, as if he longed to wrest the uttermost moiety of a meaning from her scant expressions. "Symonds shall accompany you with the carriage, and bring Captain Brand," said Margaret. "Send him, Purcell." The steward trotted away to dispatch the coachman, and the pair were left with each other. The man on the lowest step and the woman on the highest gazed fixedly in each other's faces. His fierce, envious, and inquisitive; hers cold, distrustful, and unflinching. In that silent interview their souls stood forth, each revealing to the other, and doomed to future recognition under the most perfect masking which rascality could assume to compass its end, or purity devise to hide from peril. Then Roland Mortlake bowed to the earth, and, striding back to his horse and his companion, uttered a terrible execration. The other tossed his cigar over the low stone wall into a tulip bed, and, springing to his horse, followed his angry comrade as he galloped away. "_Gardez-tu_, my friend," cried he, breezily. "You English take great news sourly, _ma foi!_ you curse Mademoiselle Fortune herself when she smiles upon you the blandest." His clipped English rang out gaily on the summer breeze, and those careless words, listened to by Margaret Walsingham on that eventful night with unheeding ears, came back one day through the mists of forgetfulness, and took their place in the wild drama with strange significance. Once more Margaret returned to her dying patroness, and met her eager, questioning eyes with mute looks of anguish. Utterly silent now, she held her poor friend's fluttering hand, and wiped the foam from her voiceless lips, and the kind old doctor turned away his brimming eyes, that he might not witness the harrowing spectacle of the woman's love and grief while performing these last gentle ministrations. The housekeeper sat at the foot of the bed, shaking with her sobs. A few of the old retainers of the household grouped near the door, stifling their lamentations as best they might. But never a word spoke poor Margaret, as she watched her last and only friend sinking from her clinging arms into the mysteries of death. The minutes sped; the doctor laid his watch upon the table; Margaret's eyes left the pallid face of the dying to watch its swift circling hands, with a tightening of the heart-strings. "I give them thirty minutes to go and return from Regis," she murmured to the doctor at last. "Will she live thirty minutes?" Dr. Gay answered nothing; but the vampire Death, fanning the sinking mortal into immortality, answered, by her convulsive face and twitching hands. "_No!_"