“He is still alive,” said the woman at the door.

“Is that all?” asked Rachel, a catch in her voice.

“It is all I’ll say till the doctor has been.”

“But he has got through the night,” sighed Rachel, thankfully.  “I could see the light in his room from hour to hour, even though I could not come.  Did you sit up with him all night long?”

“Every minute of the night,” said the other, with undisguised severity in her fixed red eyes.  “I never left him, and I never closed a lid.”

“I am so sorry!” cried Rachel, too sorry even for renewed indignation at the cause.  “But I couldn’t help it,” she continued, “I really could not.  We—­I am going abroad—­very suddenly.  Poor Mr. Severino!  I do wish there was anything I could do!  But you must get a professional nurse.  And when he does recover—­for something assures me that he will—­you can tell him—­”

Rachel hesitated, the red eyes reading hers.

“Tell him I hope he will recover altogether,” she said at length; “mind, altogether!  I have gone away for good, tell Mr. Severino; but, as I wasn’t able to do so after all, I would rather you didn’t mention that I ever thought of nursing him, or that I called last thing to ask how he was.”

And that was her farewell message to the very young man with whom a hole-and-corner scandal had coupled Rachel Minchin’s name; it was to be a final utterance in yet another respect, and one of no slight or private significance, as the sequel will show.  Within a minute or two of its delivery, Rachel was on her own doorstep for the last time, deftly and gently turning the latchkey, while the birds sang to frenzy in a neighboring garden, and the early sun glanced fierily from the brass knocker and letter-box.  Another moment and the door had been flung wide open by a police officer, who seemed to fill the narrow hall, with a comrade behind him and both servants on the stairs.  And with little further warning Mrs. Minchin was shown her husband, seated much as she had left him in the professor’s chair, but with his feet raised stiffly upon another, and the hand of death over every inch of him in the broad north light that filled the room.

The young widow stood gazing upon her dead, and four pairs of eyes gazed yet more closely at her.  But there was little to gather from the strained profile with the white cheek and the unyielding lips.  Not a cry had left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped that instant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettes against a background of grim tomes.  There was no swaying of the lissome figure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or unspoken.  In moments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is often the way in which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and complete detachment, not the least common of immediate results, makes us sometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would or should; and it was so with Rachel