“You must take care of her, Tom,” said the dying man, turning to his daughter.  “You’ll manage to pay for a brick grave, Tom, so as your mother and me can lie together?  This world’s...too many...honest man...”

At last there was total stillness, and poor Tulliver’s dimly lighted soul had ceased to be vexed with the painful riddle of this world.

Tom and Maggie went downstairs together, and Maggie spoke.  “Tom, forgive me; let us always love each other”—­and they clung and wept together.

But they were not to be always united.

Tom lived in lodgings in the town, and was anxious to provide for his sister, but Maggie preferred to take up teaching in her old boarding-school.  She met Philip Wakem again, and though Tom released her from her old promise, he could not regard Philip with any feelings of friendship.

It was when Tom had, by years of steady work, fulfilled his father’s wishes and become once more master of Dorlcote Mill that Maggie returned—­to be no more separated from her brother.  She was staying in the town near the river on the night when the flood came, and the river rose beyond its banks.  Her first thought, as the water entered the lower part of the house, was of the mill, where Tom was.  There was no time to get assistance; she must go herself, and alone.  Hastily she procured a boat, and at last reached the mill.  The water was up to the first story, but still the mill stood firm.

“Tom, where are you?  Here is Maggie!” she called out, in a loud, piercing voice.  Tom opened the middle window, and got into the boat.  Tom rowed with vigour, but a new danger was before them in the river.

“Get out of the current!” was shouted at them, but it could not be done at once.  Huge fragments of machinery, swept off one of the wharves, blocked the stream in one wide mass, and the current swept the boat swiftly on to its doom.

“It is coming, Maggie!” Tom said, in a deep, hoarse voice, loosing the oars and clasping her.

The next instant the boat was no longer seen upon the water, and brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted; living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love.

“In their death they were not divided.”

* * * * *

ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN

Waterloo

Emile Erckmann was born at Phalsbourg, in Alsace, on May 20, 1822, and Alexandre Chatrian, at Soldatenthal, on December 18, 1826.  Erckmann, the son of a bookseller, became a law student, and was admitted to the Bar in 1858.  But the law studies were always uncongenial, and Erckmann meeting Chatrian as a fellow student in the gymnasium at Phalsbourg, the two young men decided to join forces in authorship.  The Erckmann-Chatrian partnership lasted from 1860 to 1885, and resulted in a remarkable