I be happy with Phil dead in the sea?” She was beginning to soften; the mood was passing off, and though her face was pale as ashes, the glitter was gone from her eyes, which turned at last toward Margery, who had looked on in utter astonishment. “Oh, Margie, Margie, help me. I don’t know what I have been saying. I think I must be crazy,” she said, as she stretched her arms towards Margery, who went to her at once, and leading her to the couch made her lie down while she soothed and quieted her until a faint color came back to her face, and her heart-beats were not so rapid and loud. Across the room by the window Mr. Beresford was still standing, with a troubled look upon his face, and seeing him Queenie called him to her, and putting her icy hand in his, said to him very gently: “Forgive me if I have wounded you. I am not myself when these moods are upon me. I don’t know what I said, for my heart is with Phil, and Phil is in the sea. Now go away, please, and leave me alone with Margie.” Mr. Beresford bowed, and pressing the hand he held, said, in a choking voice: “God bless you, Queenie, and comfort you, and forgive me if anything I said was instrumental in sending Phil away. He was the dearest friend I ever had, the one I liked the best and enjoyed the most, and I never shall forget him or cease to mourn for him. Good-by, Queenie; good-afternoon, Miss La Rue.” He bowed himself from the room, and was soon riding slowly homeward, with sad thoughts in his heart of the friend he had lost and who seemed to be so near him that more than once he started and looked around as if expecting to meet Phil’s pleasant face and hear his well-remembered laugh. Mr. Beresford belonged to that class of men, who, without exactly saying there is no God and no hereafter, still doubt it in their hearts, and by trying to explain everything on scientific principles, throw a vail over the religion they were taught to hold so sacred in their childhood. But death had never touched him very closely, or borne away that for which he mourned with a very keen or lasting sense of loss and pain. His father had died when he was a boy, and though his mother lived till he was a well-grown youth, she had not attached him very strongly to her. He had been very proud of her as an elegant, fashionable woman who sometimes came in her lovely party dress to look at him before going out to some place of amusement, but he had never known what it was to be petted and caressed, and when she died his sorrow was neither deep nor lasting, and in his maturer manhood, when the seeds of skepticism were taking root, he could think without a pang that possibly there was beyond this life no place where loved ones meet again and friendships are renewed; nothing but oblivion—a long, dreamless sleep.