She opened the paper with eagerness, and read the account it gave of the Coroner's inquiry held at the Cowroast a week before. The newspaper dropped to the ground. She stood a moment, leaning against the mantelpiece, every feature in her face expressing the concentration of thought which held her; then she dropped into a chair, and raising her two hands to her eyes, she pressed the shut lids close, lifting her face as though to some unseen misery, while a little sound--infinitely piteous--escaped her. She saw a bedroom in a foreign inn--a vague form in the bed--a woman moving about in nurse's dress, the same woman who had just died in John Broad's cottage--and her sister Edith sitting by the fire. The door leading to the passage is ajar, and she is watching.... Or is it the figure in the bed that is watching?--a figure marred by illness and pain? Through the door comes hastily a form--a man. With his entrance, movement and life, like a rush of mountain air, come into the ugly shaded room. He is tall, with a long face, refined and yet violent, instinct with the character and the pride of an old hectoring race. He comes to the bed, kneels down, and the figure there throws itself on his breast. There is a sound of bitter sobbing, of low words-- Alice Puttenham's hands dropped from her face--and lay outstretched upon her knee. She sat, staring before her, unconscious of the garden outside, or of the passage of time. In some ways she was possessed of more beauty at thirty-seven than she had been at twenty. And yet from childhood her face had been a winning one--with its childish upper lip and its thin oval, its delicate brunette colour, and the lovely clearness of its brown eyes. In youth its timid sweetness had been constantly touched with laughter. Now it shrank from you and appealed to you in one. But the departure of youth had but emphasized a certain distinction, a certain quality. Laughter was gone, but grace and character remained, imprinted also on the fragile body, the beautiful arms and hands. The only marring of the general impression came from an effect of restlessness and constraint. To live with Alice Puttenham was to conceive her as a creature subtly ill at ease, doing her best with a life which was, in some hidden way, injured at the core. * * * * *