It was too late! Was it too late? She lay in his arms white and cold and silent. Frank, kissing those pale, cold lips, chafing those dead hands, murmuring over her a thousand caressing names, distracted with despair, desperately put away the fear, and called for help in anguished tones. Then the women came in and were busy about her, and there were moaning and lamentation, but still she heard not. Fenella was not dead, but she was ill--terribly ill. The silver cord was not broken, but it was strained to its last fiber. Weeks went by, weeks when she lay in the little cottage at Guernsey, and Frank crept about with anguished eyes, and lived on the bulletins from the sick room. Weeks during which, with the gold locks short cropped, and the sweet face fever-flushed and unrecognizable, Fenella lay in bed, and shrieked in her delirium that Frank did not do it, that she did; that Frank hated her because she had done it, but she had not done it. There was blood on her hands, horrible blood, human blood. There was blood on his hands, but she would kiss them. She was swimming in blood, drowning in blood, but Frank would save her. Ronny was on the shore, waiting for her, bright-faced Ronny, waiting to kiss away the stains from them both. And then she would call out again that she was drowning, and call for Frank, always for Frank, in agonized, delirious shrieks. “Doctor! doctor!” He held him with hands grown thin and wasted, spoke to him in a voice all broken with tears, looked at him with eyes dim with wild, convulsive crying: “Will she live? will she live?” The doctor was a man who had studied humanity as well as physic. “I think so,” he answered; “there is room for hope. Every day gained brings us nearer to it. If once she sleeps, sleeps naturally, I think--she is saved.” He hesitated, and Frank, hanging on his words, pressed him further. “She will wake to reason--to mental restfulness?” He was a man; he had heard his patient in her delirium. She had a history, this beautiful young woman who called herself Mrs. Orme, and over whom Lord Francis Onslow watched with such care. She had a history, but he did not know it--did not seek to know it. No idle curiosity prompted his question. But if she woke, and woke to trouble, then--then he could not answer for the consequences. “Will you let me tell you?” Before Dr. Fairfax could say “Yes,” or “No,” Frank had dragged him back into the room, and was pouring out incoherently, quickly, the whole miserable story; their courtship, their married life, their bickerings, and the interference of relatives, their separation, his jealousy, the _murder_ that even now he could not account for or remember--everything, everything. The doctor listened, grave, sympathetic. Frank paused breathlessly. “She has a child, you say--a little child? Did she care for that, did she love it?”