The features were sharp as with age, and pallid as with the touch of death, and the long soft hair was gray, but it was still easy to recognise in the sharp and altered face what memories it had brought back to Sir Launcelot, and why that poor faded form had guarded her threshold from him better than an army of fiends. It was the flaming sword of conscience which had guarded us that night. Poor pallid wasted face, so terrible in its mute reproach! We took her up between us. It was easy. She was light enough to carry. We laid her on the old bed which her grandmother had kept always ready for her. Aunt Gretel loosened her dress and chafed her hands, while I took the poor puny child to the fire to keep it quiet while I made some warm drink to revive the mother. But the poor sickly little one was not easily to be quieted. In spite of all my soothing it awoke, and began wailing for mammy. Perhaps, after all, the best restorative! The sharp fretful cry aroused the mother from her swoon, and the grandmother from her heavy sleep. In another instant the old woman was kneeling by the poor girl's bedside, clasping and fondling her, and calling her by tender, endearing, childish names, such as no one at Netherby would have dreamed could have poured forth from Gammer Grindle's lips. The first words Cicely spoke when she fully recovered consciousness and sate up (her beautiful large gray eyes gleaming from her faded hollow cheeks like living souls among a pale troop of ghosts), were,-- "Gammer, I heard him--I heard his voice. Where is he? I thought I saw his face. But it was dusk, and faces change. But voices will be the same, I think, even in heaven or in hell. And I heard his voice, the same as when he called me darling and wife." "Wife!" said the old woman, starting and standing erect. "Say that again, Cicely." "All in vain, Gammer!" she said, with a slow hopeless tone. "With the priest and the ring! But it was all false. He told me so when it was too late. He said I must have known. But how was I to know, Gammer? I trusted him; I trusted him. Yet, perhaps, I ought to have known better, Gammer? I suppose it must have been wicked of me. Every one seems to think it was."