She holds it out with an unshaking hand, and commands her throat to swallow, to drink a toast, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the wish contained in which are alternatives equally horrible. And then they return hand-in-hand--the old man has added a new caressingness to his other tendernesses--and resume their places, one on each side of the silent, motionless form stretched between them with bound, ice-covered head, in the darkness; and Lavinia takes up again her day-long, night-long employment of repeating over and over and over again to herself the question which she is beginning to see written in red whenever she turns her eyes in the obscurity-- “_Did_ he lose his head? _Was_ it suicide? And if so, was it something he saw in her face that drove him to it?” She is going through them in the usual sequence at about four o’clock in the afternoon of her wedding day, when she happens to be for a few moments alone with the still living rigidity beside her, when in the almost complete darkness, her eyes and ears--or have they gone mad too?--detect, or seem to detect, a slight movement in the bed. She darts noiselessly to the window, and, pulling aside a bit of the curtain, casts a glance backwards towards the bed--a glance that can hardly travel, for the weight of the hope it carries. Whatever _she_ may be, her senses are not mad; nor have they told her a lie. Rupert is feebly stirring, and his eyes are open. In a second she is at his side, and stooping over him; the word is coming--the priceless word on which her reason hangs! It is spoken so low that she has to bend very close down to catch it. It is only an almost inaudible-- “Well, dear!” In the reeling immensity of her joy, she can but stupidly echo, almost as inaudibly, the greeting that seems to have come to her from the speechless other side. “Well, dear!” There is a long pause. Into Rupert’s eyes, as they turn slowly round, the watcher sees consciousness, recollection, gradually returning. When those long-absent inhabitants have reoccupied their seats, will he take back his greeting? While the answer to that inquiry is in suspense, the functions of life seem suspended in her. The slowly wandering eyes return to their point of departure--her face; regained knowledge is in them; but neither anger nor pain. “I muffed it, as usual,” he says, with a ghost of his old self-ridicule, and, wearied with the exertion of speech, falls back into unconsciousness. * * * * *