Dora looked at Gabrielle, then at the child. With heartrending cry she threw herself on Eva's body. The struggle was over, and she had lost the battle. Her strength forsook her, all her being seemed to be crushed. She slipped inanimate on the floor. They bore her to her own room, where, for more than a week, she lay benumbed by her grief, unconscious of everything, hovering between life and death. None but Gabrielle and Hobbs were allowed access to her chamber. Philip was excluded by the doctor's command. In her delirium the name of her husband was often on her lips. "Philip," she would cry, "murderer! you have killed my child." He had been indeed her murderer! involuntarily it is true, but nevertheless he had killed her. If he had resisted his desire to look upon his child, she would probably have recovered, surrounded as she was by the most assiduous care. Her death had been accidental. In moving, and in trying to lift her poor little fragile body into a sitting posture, she had caused the derangement of the tube, and the heart had been suddenly stopped. Choking and syncope instantly did their dreadful work, and all was over. Neither Dora nor Gabrielle ever knew, however, that Philip had been the involuntary cause of Eva's death. He himself never suspected the terrible truth. "In spite of my injunctions," said the doctor, "the child has been allowed to move herself. She must have sat up in bed." The last words that Eva had said to her mother came back constantly to Dora's memory. "How sad it is here! Oh, mama, how I wish we were in our other house; you know, the one where we lived when we were happy." Poor little darling! "When we were happy." A phrase like that in the mouth of a child of five, intended by nature for joy and brightness, had made Dora's heart bleed. The last words of the child were the irrevocable sentence of the father. Tears might have relieved Dora's desolate heart, and her faithful watchers hoped day by day for the crisis which never came. But she lay in numb paralysing grief, and never a tear fell. Her life was not in danger, but her reason was. The delirium continued day and night. Often she did not know her two devoted nurses, Gabrielle and Hobbs. Her utterances were mostly incoherent sentences in which three names occurred constantly--Philip, Eva, Sabaroff. "Is that man gone?" and she would seek upon her arm for traces of the loathed kisses he had placed there. "Where is Philip? Gone too, no doubt." Then she would resume: "Eva? Yes, I am alone, all alone; everybody is gone." The scene quite unnerved the two dear women who were enforced spectators of it. They would take her hands and kiss them--Gabrielle with affectionate warmth, and Hobbs with the most touching respect.