She died, as she had lived, in ministering to others. Oswald’s death was the first blow. From the exposure and the physical effects she soon recovered—sooner than we expected, considering her frail and uncertain hold on life. But the horror of it was always with her, especially the feeling that it was she who had suggested the fatal experiment. Ever and again, as the subject was referred to, I could see her shuddering at the reminiscence, blaming herself with what was surely the only reproach that can have harassed her bright and blameless conscience. And the remembrance was still upon her when her two children sickened with the scarlet fever. Considering her weak state, and consequent liability to infection, the doctor had strictly forbidden her to enter their room. “I can make no promises,” she said; “if they want me I must go. Till then I will obey your orders. We are told to give up father and mother, and perhaps oneself for one’s husband, but our children, I think, have a prior claim to all.” And so she watched and waited at their door, stealing along the corridor in her robe of white at all hours of the night, listening and listening to hear if a summons came. One night, unhappily, it came—a summons she was powerless to resist. The elder child was delirious, and she heard it moaning piteously, “Mother, mother, why don’t you come to me?” Without a moment’s hesitation she had entered the room, signing her own death-warrant in the act. She did not linger long in dying; lingering was little in her way. On a grey morning in October, just ten days after she was taken ill, the gun which welcomes sunrise from the signal-station on the pier echoed like a call. She opened her eyes to greet us, and with the diamonds flickering again about her head—only they were sunbeams now—she passed to that “larger life” of which she, if anyone, held the key. “Lest we forget.” * * * * * Bindo A Sketch I THE last notes of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—sung as no other boy on earth could sing it—had just died away in a storm of applause. Now and again the surge of voices reached the green-room in a muffled roar, where Eric was protesting to the Manager that nothing would induce him to sing another note that night. “They’ve had four songs,” he said, “what on earth do they want more? As it is, I shall break my voice some day in that confounded hall. It was never meant for a boy to sing in—all wood and iron and glass—with nothing to help you or carry the voice. No! I _won’t_ sing, that’s flat; tell them I’m ill, or my mother’s come for me, or anything you like. Sing again, I _won’t_.” “Yes, I’ll tell them your mother’s come for you,” said the Manager with a laugh, “but, remember, they’ll be clamouring for ‘A boy’s best friend is his mother’ if I do.”