"He was not very strong as a boy. At one time he seemed better, but it was only for a time." "I'm very sorry," said Barbara, standing up. "Please tell him I came to ask how he was before I went." Mrs. Harding rose too, and looked straight into her visitor's eyes. "Would you like to see him?" "I don't know," the girl faltered. "I'm not sure he would care to see me. If he would--" Mrs. Harding interrupted her, "Excuse me a moment," and vanished. Barbara, left alone, stood confounded. She was taken by surprise, and yet she was conscious that to see Reynold Harding was what she had really been hoping and dreading from the first. Some one moved overhead. Perhaps he would say "No," in that harsh, sudden voice of his. Well, then, she would escape from this house, which was like a prison to her, and go back to Adrian, knowing that she had done all she could. Perhaps he would laugh, and say "Yes." She listened with strained attention. A chair was moved, a fire was stirred, a door was closed. Then her hostess reappeared. "Will you come this way?" she said. Barbara obeyed without a word. The matter was taken out of her hands, and nothing but submission was possible. The grey dusk was gathering on the stairs, and through a tall window, rimmed with squares of red and blue, rose a view of roofs and chimneys half drowned in fog. Barbara passed onward and upward, went mutely through a door which was opened for her, and saw Reynold Harding sitting by the fire. He lifted his face and looked at her. In an instant there flashed into her memory a verse of the old song of _Barbara Allen_, sung to her as a child for her name's sake:-- "_Slowly, slowly, she came up, And slowly she came nigh him; And all she said when there she came, 'Young man, I think you're dying.'_" The words, which she had sung to herself many a time, taking pleasure in their grotesque simplicity, presented themselves now with such sudden and ghastly directness, that a cold damp broke out on her forehead. She set her teeth fast, fearing that Barbara's speech would force its way through her lips with an outburst of hysterical laughter. What _could_ she say, what could anybody say, but, "Young man, I think you're dying?" The words were clamouring so loudly in her ears that she glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Harding to make sure that they had not been spoken. Reynold's smile recalled her to herself, and told her that he was reading too much on her startled face. "Won't you sit down?" he said, pointing to a chair. Before she took it she instinctively put out her hand, and greeted him with a murmur of speech. What she said she did not exactly know, but _not_ those hideous words, thank God! Mrs. Harding paused for a moment by the fire, gazing curiously at her son, as if she were studying a problem. Then silently, in obedience to some sign of his, or to some divination of her own, she turned away and left the two together.