He finally decided on the latter course, and going up to the top of the house on tiptoe, he tapped softly at Claire's bedroom door. It was opened directly by his sister, who had evidently just risen from an old dimity-covered easy-chair. She was in a long white dressing-gown, and, seen by the light of the one tallow candle on the table, she looked so pale and ghastly that the lad uttered an ejaculation and caught hold of her thin, cold hands. "Claire!--Sis!" They were the first warm words of sympathy she had heard since that horrible night; and in a moment the icy horror upon her face broke up, her lips quivered, and, throwing her arms around her brother's neck, she burst into such a passion of hysterical sobbing that, as he held her to his breast, he grew alarmed. He had stepped into the little white room where the flower screen stood out against the night sky, and as the door swung to, he had felt Claire sinking upon her knees, and imitating her action, he had held her there for some time till the attitude grew irksome, and then sank lower till he was seated on the carpet, holding his sister half-reclining across his breast. "Oh! don't--don't, Claire--Sis," he whispered from time to time, as he kissed the quivering lips, and strove in his boyish way to soothe her. "Sis dear, you'll give yourself such a jolly headache. Oh, I say, what's the good of crying like that?" For answer she only clung the tighter, the pent-up agony escaping in her tears, though she kissed him passionately again and again, and nestled to his breast. "You'll make yourself ill, you know," he whispered. "I say, don't. The dad's ill, and you'll upset him more." Still she sobbed on and wept, the outburst saving her from some more terrible mental strain. "I wanted to come and comfort you," he said. "I did not know you'd go on like this." She could not tell him that he was comforting her; that she had been tossed by a horrible life-storm that threatened to wreck her reason, and that when she had lain longing for the sympathy of the sister who now kept away, saying it was too horrible to come there now, she had found no life-buoy to which to cling. And now her younger brother had come-- the elder forbidden the house--and the intensity of the relief she felt was extreme. "Here, I can't stand this," he said at last, almost roughly. "I shall go down and send Ike for the doctor." She clung to him in an agony of dread lest he should go, and her sobs grew less frequent. "Come, that's better," he said, and he went on in his rough boyish selfishness, talking of his troubles and ignoring those of others, unconsciously strengthening Claire, as he awakened her to a sense of the duties she owed him, and giving her mental force for the terrible meeting and struggle that was to come. For she dared not think. She shrank from mentally arguing out those two questions of duty--to society and to her father. Was she to speak and tell all she knew? Was she to be silent?