Chilly caught a breath that was half a sob. "Poor little Nancy!" he whispered. He looked up at the men who stood about him, "I would like--" he said, hesitatingly but clearly, "I would be glad if some--explanation might be made of this--occurrence--which would not involve unnecessary pain to the Duchess. Perhaps that is--impossible. But I would--be grateful--" One of the younger men leaned beside him. It was Lee Carter, his closest friend, who had brought him that afternoon from the Springs. "Dear old chap!" he said, brokenly. "I was standing just under it. You saw it topple and jumped to save me! That is how it happened! Every one of us saw it." A wan smile touched the whitening lips, "Gentlemen all!" said Chilly, and closed his eyes. He lay silent then--he was breathing with increasing difficulty. At length there was the sound of a motor halting outside, and Harry and the rest went out. In the quiet of the room the door opened upon Judge and Mrs. Allen. She was deadly pale, her face frozen with anguish. She knelt beside the prostrate figure and took the cold hand of her son in hers. "Chilly!" she cried. "My poor, poor boy!" His eyes opened. He seemed, in that last fading instant, to see only her. "Duchess!" he whispered, and with the word the light died in his face. "Duchess!" Mrs. Allen looked at the Judge's quivering countenance with dull blank eyes, that saw two great tears suddenly detach themselves and roll down his pale cheeks. He took a step toward her. "Charlotte--" he stammered. "Charlotte!" There was in the shaking voice something that pierced her agony, a tone that she had not heard on his lips for many, many long years--an echo of accents that she had known when she was a bride. She gazed at him an instant voicelessly. Then all at once her face broke up and a wild cry tore itself upward from her heart. It was not the voice now of cold and placid scorn, but that of the real woman--the eternal voice of Rachel weeping for her children. The sword of overwhelming tragedy had stripped off the protecting cicatrice of pride and arrogant resentment and bared the lonely soul beneath, that in this shuddering instant groped wildly for human comfort. The Judge bent down and clasped her, and there, above the body of Chilly, for the first time since the son who lay dead before them had been born, she lay in her husband's arms, her face turned against his breast. CHAPTER XLI DARK DAYS "If I only knew!" That was Echo's mental cry in the long days that followed Chilly's burial. "If I only knew whether Harry cared for me any longer!" Sharp as was her grief for her brother, this pang was the sharper, and it did not dull with time.