Then this first image was swept away by a second. It seemed to him that he was on the pit bank again. It was night, but the crowd was still there, and big fires lighted for warmth threw a glow upon the faces. There were stars, and a pale light of snow upon the hills. He looked into the engine-house. There she was--his poor Letty! O God! He tried to get through to her, to speak to her. Impossible! A sound disturbed his dream. His ear and brain struggled with it--trying to give it a name. A man's long, painful breaths--half sobs. Burrows, no doubt--thinking of the woman he loved--of the poor emaciated soul George had seen him tending in the cottage garden on that April day. He put out his hand and touched his companion. "Don't despair," he whispered; "you will see her again. How strange--we two--we enemies--but this is the end. Tell me about her." "I took her from a ruffian who had nearly murdered her and the child," said the hoarse voice after a pause. "She was happy--in spite of the drink, in spite of everything--she would have been happy, till she died. To think of her alone is too cruel. If people turned their backs on her, I made up." "You will see her again," George repeated, but hardly knowing what the words were he said. When he next spoke it was with an added strength that astonished his companion. "Burrows, promise me something. Take a message from me to my wife. Come nearer." Then, as he felt his companion's breath on his cheek, he roused himself to speak plainly: "Tell her--I sent her my dear love--that I thanked her with all my heart and soul for her love--that it was very hard to leave her--and our child. Write the words for her, Burrows. Tell her it was impossible for me to write, but I dictated this." He paused for a long time, then resumed: "And tell her, too--my last wish was--that she should ask Lord and Lady Maxwell--can you hear plainly?"--he repeated the names--"to be her friends and guardians. And bid her ask them--from me--not to forsake her. Have you understood? Will you repeat it?" Burrows, in the mood of one humouring the whim of the dying, repeated what had been said to him word by word, his own sensuous nature swept the while by the terrors of a death which seemed but one little step further from himself than from Tressady. Yet he did his best to understand, and recollect; and to the message so printed on his shrinking brain a woman's misery owed its only comfort in the days that followed. "Thank you," said Tressady, painfully listening for the last word. "Give me your hand. Good-bye. You and I--The world's a queer place--I wish I'd turned you back at the pit's mouth. I wanted to show I bore no malice. Well--at least I know--" The words broke off incoherently. Burrows caught the word "suffering," and some phrase about "the men," then Tressady's head slipped back against the wall, and he spoke no more.