She took a warm wrapper from the bed and folded it round Lady Gerardine. She supported her to an armchair and placed a cushion to her feet. The ministering hands were warm and strong; and Rosamond felt suddenly that in truth she was cold and weak, and that these attentions were grateful to her. She looked up again at the withered face, ethereally aged, at the blue eyes that seemed illumined from some source not of this world. "Perhaps I did want you," she said. A thin, self-absorbed, silent woman was old Mary. She regarded the world as with the gaze of the seer and moved within the small circlet of her duty wrapped in a mystic dignity of her own. Some held her in contempt, as madwoman; others in awe, as having "seen things." If the manor-house had the reputation of being haunted, it was doubtless due to Mary’s ways. No one from the neighbourhood would have consented to inhabit the ancient place with her. But fortunately Mary had a stout niece of her own, who averred that ghosts were indigestion, and who slept the sleep of the scrubber and the just, no matter what else might walk. The housekeeper’s strange eyes softened as she looked down into the fair pale face of her young master’s widow. "My dear lady that’s gone," she said, "must be glad to know that there is another heart keeping watch here." Her voice was soft and had a muffled sound as of one used to long silence. The tone seemed to harmonise with the singularity of the words. A small cold shiver ran over Rosamond; she stared without replying. "The day the news came," proceeded the housekeeper, dreamily, "she set up that altar to him. And there she found peace." As old Mary spoke, the habit of the trained servant was still strong upon her. She stooped to tuck in the fold of Rosamond’s dressing-gown closer round her feet. "There she prayed," she went on, as she straightened herself again, "and then, he came back to her in peace." Rosamond closed the frame in her hands with a snap. She felt every impulse within her strike out against the mystic atmosphere that seemed to be closing round her. "What are you saying?" she cried sharply. "In Heaven’s name what do you mean? Who came back—the dead?" Old Mary smiled again. She bent over the chair. "Why, ma’am," she said, as if speaking to a frightened child, "you don’t need to be told, a good lady like you: to those that have faith, there is no death." "No death!" echoed Rosamond. "All life is death. Everything is full of death." There was a strangling bitterness in her throat that broke forth in a harsh laugh. The placid room seemed to swim round with her; when she came to herself the servant was holding her hands once more. Her voice was falling into her ears with a measured soothing cadence: