As if to encourage the singular fancy, that the whispered story and the surroundings of the hour had called up in her over-strung nerves and brain, a gust wilder than any that had gone before swept past the house at the moment with a rushing moan. The casement shook; its fastenings seemed to strain: and the poor young lady, in some irrepressible freak of courage, born of desperation, drew aside the curtain and looked forth. No, no; nothing was there but the wind. The white snow lay on the ground, and covered the cliff that skirted the beach on the right. The night was light, disclosing the foam of the waves as they rose and fell; clouds were sweeping madly across the face of the sky. The little girl stirred in bed and threw out her arms. Her mother let fall the window curtain and softly approached her. The hot face wore its fever-crimson; the large brown eyes, so like her father's, opened the red lips parted with a cry. "Maman! Marie soif; Marie veut boire." "Oh, is she fatherless?" mentally cried the poor mother, as she took up the glass of tisane. "Oui, ma petite! ma chérie! Bois donc, Marie; bois!" The child seized the glass with her hot and trembling little hands, and drank from it. She seemed very thirsty. Before her mother had replaced it within the fender and come back to her, her pretty face was on the pillow again, her eyes were closing. Madame Guise--as we must continue to call her--went to bed: but not to sleep. The wind raged, the child by her side was restless, her own mind was in a chaos of horror and trouble. The words of the prophet Isaiah in Holy Writ might indeed have been applied to her: The whole head was sick and the whole heart faint.