“No, Fanny,” Inez said. “I shall never go to New York. It is lovely in you to suggest it and to be glad I am your sister. You don’t know what joy it is to have you call me so, and to believe you love me. In some circumstances I might have gone with you for a while, for I should like to see the eastern world where father and Tom were born. He must be Tom to me always, and it will not be long. I am going as mother did, only not so sudden. I am younger and stronger, but I know I am dying. I feel as if part of me were dead already and there is nothing to rally from. The tree struck with lightning twice does not recover. I have been struck twice, once in the stage when——oh, Fanny, I can’t talk of that without my heart standing still. The second shock was different and came when I heard that father and Tom were somebody else, and you my sister. I was so weak that it was like another blow. For your sake I’d like to live, although our paths would be apart. Yours in the great, busy world, and mine here with father. I wish I could see your Roy, but it is too much to think he would come across a continent.” Inez had thought all this out the previous night after her father told her that Fanny knew of the relationship, and now that she had said it she sank into a state of great exhaustion, during which Fanny staid by her and every time she put her hand on Inez’s head, or spoke her name, the sick girl’s eyes opened with an expression of unutterable joy, and the pale lips whispered “My sister!” That night Fanny wrote to her mother: “I know everything from ’Tina to the present time. Tom has told me that Mr. Rayborne was Mark Hilton, my father, and Inez my sister. _My father_ told me the rest, and I do not believe there is anything more for me to learn about myself. At first I prickled all over and could scarcely speak. Now I am very calm and glad and should be happy if Inez were not so low. I think she is going to die, and I cannot leave her. I shall write to Roy to-morrow and tell him everything. I hope he will come. I want him to see Inez.” After this Fanny devoted herself entirely to Inez, taking quite as much care of her as the hired nurse. But it was of no avail. Inez grew weaker every day and baffled both the physician from Stockton and the specialist from San Francisco, who had been called to see her. That there was serious heart trouble, complicated with slight paralysis, both agreed, but neither could understand why the stage fright alone should have affected her so strangely. If love and care and tenderness could have given her back her life she would have had it, but nothing could save her. Every night she seemed weaker, and every morning her face looked thinner and her hands more transparent as they lay just where they were put, for she had but little power to move them now.