“Don’t say a word. You are to keep quiet,” she said, when Louie began to protest and try to explain. “I know everything from Mr. Blake, to whom I wrote, asking for particulars, and only wish I had been there to help you. I have long wanted something to do—something to care for and divert my mind. I have you at last, and am glad. So sit still and take the good the gods provide.” And Louie took the good. In fact, she was too tired and worn to do much else than sit still and let others care for her and her mother. The latter did not improve as they hoped she might. It was more than nervous exhaustion. It was a general breaking up of all the life centers of her being, and she could not rally. For the most of the time she thought herself at home, but nearly always seemed to know that her husband was dead. Sometimes she talked to him, and told him she was coming to join him and that everything he had left in a tangle would be straightened by Louie and Mr. Lansing. She frequently coupled their names together; and Louie’s cheeks would burn as she heard it, and then turn white, with the fear gathering strength day by day as she sat by her mother’s side, and watched the flickering flame brightening at intervals and then dying down until it went out forever: and Louie was alone so far as her mother was concerned, but surrounded with everything which love and sympathy could devise to comfort her. For weeks a chilly fog had hung over the great city, but it cleared at last, and the wintry sun shone bright and warm upon the grave in Kensal Green where Mrs. Grey was buried, while Miss Percy and Fred Lansing stood on either side of Louie, whose face was white as that of the corpse the coffin covered from her sight. “I know you are trying to comfort me,” she said, as they were driving back to the hotel, “and by and by I shall thank you, but I can’t talk now, I am so sorry, and so tired and so sick.” They knew she was sick, and the physician and nurse who had attended her mother were retained for her during the weeks which followed, when she hovered between life and death, battling with exhaustion and brain fever in its worst form, and cared for with all the sympathy of a sister by Miss Percy, and all the devotion of a lover by Fred Lansing, who watched by her constantly, with a terrible fear in his heart that the treasure he coveted might be snatched from him just as its possession seemed possible. Mrs. Lansing, too, who seldom evinced much interest in anyone outside her family, was interested in this young girl, who she felt intuitively would some day be her daughter-in-law, and she sat by the bedside many an hour when she would otherwise have been resting in her own room.