What passed at the new Ballamona on that morning of Dan's penance was very pitiful. There, in the death-chamber already darkened, lay Ewan's young wife, her eyes lightly closed, her girlish features composed, and a faint tinge of color in her cheeks. Her breast was half open, and her beautiful head lay in a pillow of her soft brown hair. One round arm was stretched over the counterpane, and the delicate fingers were curved inward until the thumb-nail, like an acorn, rested on the inner rim of a ring. Quiet, peaceful, very sweet and tender, she lay there like one who slept. After a short, sharp pang she had died gently, without a struggle, almost without a sigh, merely closing her eyes as one who was weary, and drawing a long, deep breath. In dying she had given premature birth to a child, a girl, and the infant was alive, and was taken from the mother at the moment of death. When the Deemster entered the room, with a face of great pallor and eyes of fear, Mona was standing by the bed-head gazing down, but seeing nothing. The Deemster felt the pulse of the arm over the counterpane with fingers that trembled visibly. Then he shot away from the room, and was no more seen that day. The vicar, the child-wife's father, came with panting breath and stood by the bedside for a moment, and then turned aside in silence. Ewan came, too, and behind him Dan walked to the door and there stopped, and let Ewan enter the chamber of his great sorrow alone. Not a word was said until Ewan went down on his knees by the side of his wife, and put his arms about her, and kissed her lips, still warm, with his own far colder lips, and called to her softly by her name, as though she slept gently, and must not be awakened too harshly, and drew her to his breast, and called again, in a tenderer tone that brushed the upturned face like a caress: "Aileen! Aileen! Aileen!" Mona covered her eyes in her hands, and Dan, where he stood at the door, turned his head away. "Aileen! Ailee! Ailee! My Ailee!" The voice went like a whisper and a kiss into the deaf ear, and only one other sound was heard, and that was the faint cry of an infant from the room below. Ewan raised his head and seemed to listen; he paused and looked at the faint color in the quiet cheeks; he put his hand lightly on the heart, and looked long at the breast that did not heave. Then he drew his arms very slowly away, and rose to his feet. For a moment he stood as one dazed, like a man whose brain is benumbed, and, with the vacant light still in his eyes, he touched Mona on the arm and drew her hand from her eyes, and he said, as one who tells you something that you could not think, "She is dead!" Mona looked up into his face, and at sight of it the tears rained down her own. Dan had stepped into the room noiselessly, and came behind Ewan, and when Ewan felt his presence, he turned to Dan with the same vacant look, and repeated in the same empty tone, "She is dead!"