In one anguished instant he comprehended that it was no spirit he gazed upon, but Violet Mead herself, crazed by her illness, escaped from her watchers and about to end her sorrows in the deep and rushing river. With a lightning bound, he flew to the rescue, a cry of terror on his blanched lips, his arms outstretched toward the flying figure, already making the fatal spring, hovering in mid-air, her white garments and golden curls fluttering in the chilly breeze that swayed the willows on the bank. The silvery moon never shone on a face more deadly pale and anguished than Cecil Grant’s as he realized that a plunge in the cold waters of the river would be fatal to the life of the feverish girl. Already she was at the point of death, and the shock of the immersion would surely extinguish the last feeble flickering spark of her young life. All in an instant these thoughts rushed over him, blent with a silent prayer to God for help in this hour of deadly peril to his darling. It seemed to him afterward that surely Heaven, in its divine pity, had lent him wings, or he never could have cleared so quickly the intervening space between him and Violet. But joy! joy! his outstretched hands clutched the hem of her white robes, and he made a fierce spring, drawing her with him back from the arms of death. In the rapidity of the recoil both fell upon the soft grass. “Saved! saved!” the young man almost shouted in his delirious joy, and he sprang quickly erect, stripping off his coat to wrap it about Violet’s thinly clad and shivering form. He raised the golden head upon his arm, cuddling the bare little feet tenderly against his body to protect them from the chilly air, and murmured, tenderly, anxiously: “Violet! Sweet Violet!” The large, blue eyes of the poor girl flared wide open, and looked up at him in wild reproach. “Ah, Cecil! cruel Cecil! you should have let me die!” she moaned, piteously. “You are false to me, and I cannot bear my life!” Cecil believed that the complaint arose from her fevered mind, and, bending down, he kissed her pale lips with adoring love, then whispered: “That is only a fancy of your sickness, my own little darling! I love you better than life itself, and I have never been false to you, even in the most secret thought. Why, I have been almost crazed over your sickness! Has not Amber told you how I waited here each night with fond impatience for her to come, and tell me how you were getting on?” Sweet Violet turned herself feebly on his arm and scanned his earnest face with eager, questioning blue eyes, and his heart ached to feel how light and frail her form had grown with the cruel sickness. With a choking sob in her throat, she cried: