Cousin Hetty felt a long, rigorous tremor run through her, partly the cold of the mountain evening, partly an inner chill. "Poor _Flora_!" she said now in a trembling voice. It was the only word she spoke, the only comment she made on what he had told her, on what he was to tell her. "Well, when my train pulled into Bayonne the next morning, there was Marise to meet me, and great Scott! she almost scared the life out of me, crying and hanging on to me. I didn't know what _had_ happened, besides what was in the paper, what she had heard! But in a minute, she got over that enough to tell me what _she_ thought the matter was ... her mother all shaken up from the nervous shock of seeing somebody killed, all upset, gone to a convent for a rest-cure. Lots of folks do that in France, instead of going to a hospital or sanitarium, as they do here. I didn't think from the way she spoke she even knew who it was who had been killed. You'd better believe _I_ didn't say anything about who it was, either! I wanted to go easy and find out how things were. I kept my ears and eyes open: but I didn't get anything that would give me a lead from Marise, except that I found that her music-teacher had piled right in and stayed by her till I got there. And I was pretty sure she wouldn't have told Marise anything, and would have kept anybody's else mouth shut. It came out casually, for one thing, that she had sequestered that newspaper I saw, before Marise had a chance to look at it. Well, it looked as though the first thing was to get Flora home where I could stand guard over her, till the thing blew over." He burst out savagely, "Good God! How was I to dream that she was so sick!" He made some violent gesture which his old kinswoman felt, but could not see in the darkness. "But she was. When we went to see her that afternoon, the doctor was there with her, and told me there wasn't a chance in a thousand for her. Double pneumonia. We saw her for a moment that afternoon, and the minute Marise went to bed that evening, I went back. But I was too late. Hetty, you never saw anything like how young she looked ... like a little girl, as if she'd died without having lived. The nice old Sister who had taken care of her had put flowers around her, white roses. And she was crying. She was about the only friend Flora had, the only one of them who didn't want something out of her." Cousin Hetty's face was wet with tears, but she let them fall silently, not stirring a hand to wipe them away. Her cousin stirred a great deal, moving restlessly on the bench, folding and refolding his arms impatiently.