An undertaker had been sent for, and while waiting for him Miss Hansford had closed the door to keep intruders out. This was Elithe’s chance. Stealthily, as if she were guilty of a misdemeanor, she crossed the threshold, shut the door and was alone with the dead. She had no time more than to glance at the white face, handsomer in death than in life, because of the peaceful expression which had settled upon it at the last. His hands were folded one over the other upon his chest, where Miss Hansford put them. “He wore it on his right,” Elithe thought, remembering just how the ring looked when she first saw it in Stokes’s cabin. Taking the hand in hers, she pushed the ring on to the third finger, knowing it would stay there, as she had some trouble to get it over the joint. Very carefully she placed the left hand over the right, shivering from head to foot with the awful chill it gave her and recoiling once as she fancied the stiffened fingers clasped hers as the living ones had done just before Jack died. As she left the room she saw the undertaker on the walk, and with him a number of people, who were just coming to the scene of the tragedy. “I was none too soon,” she thought, as she escaped up the stairs and ran into her chamber. Miss Hansford met the undertaker, and, conducting him to where the body lay, stayed by while the preparations were made for taking it to the Percy cottage. When all were gone except a few who lingered round the house and near the spot where Jack was found and where his blood was still staining the low shrubs and sand, she went to Elithe’s room and said, just as she had never spoken to her before: “Now tell me all you know about Jack Percy.” At the sound of her stern voice, Elithe, who was lying down, sat up, and, shedding her hair back from her throbbing temples, said, pleadingly: “Must I tell you now, when I am so tired and my head aches so hard?” “Yes, now; and tell it as it is,—no prevarication!” Elithe took her hands from her head and looked at her aunt in surprise. “Why should I prevaricate? There is nothing to conceal,” she said. “I told you something about him once, and I will tell you again,” and, beginning at the beginning, she repeated every particular of her acquaintance with Jack from the day she first saw him to the present time. As she talked Miss Hansford felt her knees giving out and she sat down upon the bed, with a feeling that she was living in the midst of a romance as well as of a tragedy. “And are you sure you did not care for him,—love him, I mean?” she asked, and Elithe answered, quickly: “No; oh, no, I did not! I could not; he was my friend,—father’s friend; that is all.” “And you put the ring on his finger?” was Miss Hansford’s next question. “Yes, I put it on his finger,” Elithe repeated, with a shudder. “Please cover me up; I am so cold.”