"This is Wednesday... Wednesday afternoon. You remember what was to happen on Wednesday afternoon?... Bernard has just had a wire to say that his mother has had a stroke. He is going to her at once--we are both going. He says I am to nurse her... We leave in--er--in a quarter of an hour... Grizel! I... I was just starting for the summer-house, when he met me with this news. There is no time for--anything... Will _you_ explain?" Grizel's voice came back in instant reassurement. "Cassandra, I will! Leave it to me... Cassandra, darling, _how_ long are you to be away?" "I don't know. How should I? Goodness knows!" cried Cassandra bitterly. Like a faint, sweet echo came back the words in Grizel's deepest tones: "Goodness knows!" CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT. FAREWELL! The old Mater was not unconscious. The mysterious physical lightning had smitten the left side of the body, left a drawn, disfigured face, and a helpless arm and leg, but the spirit within was untouched. By the time that her son arrived, the old Mater had realised what had happened to her, and was seething with bitterness and rebellion. It was a terrible sight to see the blaze of the living eye in the dead face; a piteous thing to listen to the mumbled words which proceeded from the twisted lips. The tears came into the Squire's eyes as he stood by his mother's bed, he knelt on the floor beside her, and stroked her brow with his big sunburnt hand; with extraordinary sharpness he divined the meaning of her muffled speech. Throughout that evening, and for hours at a time throughout the days which followed, he sat by her bedside, ministering to her wants with clumsy eagerness. Cassandra was for the time being too intensely absorbed with the tragedy of her own life to feel any active interest in what was passing before her eyes, but subconsciously the various pictures photographed themselves on her mind. Bernard smiling, indifferent to snubs, persuading his mother to eat, to swallow her medicine; Bernard, suppressing yawns, sitting up to the small hours to be "at hand"; Bernard holding the cold hand between his own warm palms, and by force of his strong electric current soothing the patient to sleep. He was not _trying_ to be patient; he _was_ patient, out of pure loving kindness and compassion. Slowly, gradually, the knowledge penetrated into Cassandra's brain, and she asked herself sadly wherein she had failed, that this quality of tenderness was so lacking towards herself! For some months after their marriage Bernard had been the most ardent of lovers, then passion waned, and with no appreciable second stage, neglect had taken its place. She had been bitterly surprised, bitterly wounded, but what had she done to recapture her husband's love, and turn it into a more enduring form? Had she once realised, as Grizel Beverley had realised in the midst of her bridal joy, that love is a tender plant, which can only preserve its fragrance when tended with