'No--yes. I heard her name from him only in the ravings of fever. He never thought I knew, till the very last: then I named her once; then he kissed me; then he went.' She turned back to the earliest evidence, telling in detail of Christian's mad course with her; then of his ravings that remained in her memory painfully distinct; she kept back nothing. Later she came to faltering for a moment till Lois urged: 'And he asked you to be his wife?' 'Yes.' 'And because of this knowledge you refused him?' 'Yes. And he kissed me for joy of that nay-saying. On the very morrow he went--do you remember? It was to her, I knew it.' 'O Rhoda, you might have saved him, and you did not!' Rhoda raised her head and looked her wonder, for Christian's sake, with resentment. 'God smote one,' she said, 'whose hand presumed to steady His ark.' 'O child, have you nothing to show to clear him?' 'Wait, wait! There is much yet to tell.' Then she sped on the last day with its load for record, and, scrupulously exact, gave words, tones, looks: his first going and return; the coming of Philip's kinsmen; that strange vagary of the rowan berries that he had won her to a bet. Lois had come upon a garbled version of Christian's escape; Rhoda gave her his own, brief and direct. 'Was it Christian--man alive!--that came to you?' 'It was. It was. He ate and drank.' Of their last meeting and parting she told, without reserve, unashamed, even to her kissing the Cross on his breast. Was ever maiden heart so candid of its passion for a man, and he alive? Too single-hearted was Rhoda to know how much of the truth exhaled from her words. Without real perception Lois drew it in; she grew very still; even her hands were still. Verily it had got to this: that to hear her dearest were dead, merely dead, could be the only better tale to come. 'Then,' said Rhoda, 'the morrow came and closed, and I would not believe he could have kept his promise to be dead; and a day and a day followed; and I dared tell you nothing, seeing I might not tell you all. Then I thought that in such extremity for your sake I did right to discover all I could of his secret; at least I would know if she, Diadyomene, were one vowed as I guessed in the House Monitory. 'Now I know, though I would not own it then, that deep in my heart was a terrible dread that if my guess were good, no death, but a guilty transaction had taken our Christian from us. Ah! how could I? after, for his asking, I had prayed for her. 'Now, though the truth lies still remote, beyond any guess of mine; though I heard of a thing--God only knows how she came by her life or her death--lacking evidence, ay, or against evidence, we yet owe him trust in the dark, never to doubt of his living worthily--if--he be not--dead worthily. Ah, ah! which I cannot tell you.