As she spoke, she was thankful she had drawn the story from her mother one day in bored curiosity. “Do you think she did not beg him to hurry after her? Do you think the years were not long to the man she left behind? Think of the time when you were only a child and busy with lessons and play; think how your father sat alone at night with his sorrow; think of the things he could never say to her, and how he longed for the touch of her hand many a time--and then say, if you can, that it is nothing to you that they are together again, you that he loved, you that she died for!” With a great cry Cristiane flung out her arms. “Ismay! Ismay! Help me to bear it! I know--I’ve always known--he wanted her!” Tears came at last from her frozen eyes. She clung wildly to the girl who held her. “But I never thought he’d leave me.” “God took him, Cristiane,” said Ismay, and as she said it she believed it. “Tell me all you know, quick!” her voice thick with sobbing. With all the strength of her young, lithe body, Ismay lifted her and sat down with her on her bed. “He was going to Rome--she died there,” she whispered. “The train was wrecked at Aix. He was--Cristiane, it was night, he was asleep, and he woke in paradise with the woman he loved so long!” Cristiane’s arms clutched her suddenly. “He didn’t suffer, tell me! I’ll be brave; he always liked me to be brave.” Brave! Ismay could have laughed outright. If this were bravery, what did you call the other thing? Not all death and hell could have made her cry as Cristiane was crying now. “He never felt it, he never knew,” she answered, and if her voice hardened Cristiane did not hear it. As if the words tore the very soul out of her, she cried out: “I want father! Oh! I want my father!” Ismay Trelane at that cry for once was awed to silence. She stooped and kissed the golden head that lay on her shoulder; kissed it with a passion of pity, a sudden feeling of protection that was real, for Cristiane le Marchant. A knock came on the closed door. “Tell them to go away,” Cristiane gasped. “Don’t move; don’t go. I don’t want any one but you!” The leap of sudden rapture in Ismay’s heart made her clutch at her side. This was what she had wanted. Her work was done as no one else could have done it. “No one shall come in,” she answered softly. “Let me go and speak to whoever it is for a minute and tell them to go away.” She laid Cristiane deftly on the pillows, and with noiseless swiftness slipped into the passage, closing the door behind her. Mrs. Trelane was there, pale with nervous fright. “It’s that man Cylmer. He wants to see her. What shall I do? Does she know about her father?” “Luckily for us, she does,” said the girl dryly. “Where do you suppose we should have been if the maid had been with her and Mr. Cylmer had come? She would have gone down and heard it from him.” “Why not him as well as any other?” asked her mother, with quick suspicion.