"Zounds, how weak I feel," he ejaculated. "I hope the girl won't die. Anyhow, I have no notion of figuring at a death-bed scene. So I'll just keep myself out of the way until the thing is decided. Then, I'll run down and let Cora coddle me up a bit. I can explain my wounded arm as the result of a little affair at the card-table." Noon came, and slowly, slowly, stern Death relaxed his grasp upon the miserable girl, for Death, like man, finds no satisfaction in claiming willing victims. Slowly the life fluttered back to her heart; and because Death had yielded her up, and to retain it would be to lose her life, reason forsook her. Under the watchful care of the skilled nurse, and the ministrations of the young physician, she now lay tossing in the delirium of fever. Nothing worse to fear, for days at least, reported the doctor. So the afternoon train bore Lucian Davlin away from the city and his victim, to seek repose and diversion in the society of his comrade, Cora. "She will come out of this now, I think," he muttered. "Then--Oh! I'll tame your proud spirit yet, my lady! I would not give you up now for half a million." And he meant it. CHAPTER VIII. THREADS OF THE FABRIC. What had become of Madeline Payne? The question went the round of the village, as such questions do. The servants of Oakley fed upon it. They held secret conferences in the kitchen, and grew loud and argumentative when they knew John Arthur was safely out of hearing. They bore themselves with an air of subdued, unobservant melancholy in his presence, and waxed important, mysterious and unsatisfactory, when in converse with the towns folk--as was quite right and proper, for were they not, in the eyes of mystery hunters, objects of curiosity secondary only to their master himself? The somber-faced old housekeeper gave utterance to a doleful croak or two, and a more doleful prophecy. But after a summons from John Arthur, and a brief interview with him in the closely shut sacredness of his especial den, not even the social intercourse of the kitchen and the inspiration that the prolonged absence of the master always lent to things below stairs, could beguile from her anything beyond the terse statement that "she didn't meddle with her master's affairs," and she "s'posed Miss Madeline knew where she was." The housemaid, who read novels and was rather fond of Miss Payne, grieved for a very little while, but found in this "visitation of providence," as John Arthur piously termed it, food for romance weaving on her own responsibility. She entertained Peter, the groom, coachman and general factotum, with divers suggestions and suppositions, each more soul harrowing than the last, making of poor Madeline a lay figure upon which she fitted all the catastrophes that had ever befallen her yellow-covered "heroinesses."