When Ellesborough re-entered, he found a white vision, lying in a bare room, from which all traces of ordinary living had been as far as possible cleared away. Only the Christmas roses which Rachel had gathered that afternoon were now on her breast. Her hands were folded over them. Her beautiful hair lay unbound on the pillow--Janet's trembling hands had refused to cut it. At sight of Ellesborough, Janet rose from her kneeling posture beside the dead, as white and frozen almost as Rachel herself--with something in her hand--a small book. She held it out to Ellesborough. "The Superintendent asked my leave to go into her room--in case there was anything which could help them. He brought me this. She had been writing in it--He asked me to look at it. I did--just enough to see--that no one had any right to it--but you. She wrote it I think about an hour before you came. It was her last word." "I have her letters also"--said Ellesborough, almost inaudibly, as he took the book--"You brought it--you kind woman! You were her good angel--God reward you!" Then at last a convulsion of weeping showed in Janet's face. She laid her hand in his, and went noiselessly away. Ellesborough sat beside his dead love all night. The farm was peaceful again after that rush of the Furies through it, which had left this wreck behind. Rachel's diary and letter lay before him. They were as her still living voice in his ears, and as the words sank into memory they pierced through all the rigidities of a noble nature, rending and kneading as they went. He recalled his own solitary hour of bitterness after her letter reached him. The story it contained had gone very hard with him, though never for one moment had he even in thought forsaken her. There was some comfort in that. But the memory which upheld him, which alone kept him from despair, was the memory of her face at the window, the sense still lingering in his own physical pulses of her young clinging life in his arms, of the fluttering of her poor heart against his breast, the exquisite happiness of her kiss--the kiss which death cut short. No--he had not failed her. That was all he had to live by. And without it, it seemed to him, he could not have endured to live. * * * * *