Biddy was by her side in a moment, speaking in a rapid whisper.  “Arrah thin, Miss Dinah darlint, don’t ye be scared at all!  She’ll speak to ye in a minute, sure.  It’s only that she’s tired to-night.  She’ll be more herself like in the morning.”

Dinah hung over the still figure.  Biddy’s whispering was as the buzzing of a fly.  She heard it with the outer sense alone.

“Isabel!” she said; and again with a passionate earnestness, “Isabel—­darling—­my darling—­what has happened to you?”

At the sound of that pleading voice Isabel moved, seeming as it were to return slowly from afar.

“Why, Dinah dear!” she said.

Her dark eyes smiled up at her in welcome, but it was a smile that cut her to the heart with its aloofness, its total lack of gladness.

Dinah stooped to kiss her.  “Are you so tired, dearest?  Perhaps I had better go away.”

But Isabel put up a trembling, skeleton hand and detained her.  “No, dear, no!  I am not so tired as that.  I can’t talk much; but I can listen.  Sit down and tell me about yourself!”

Dinah sat down, but she could think of nothing but the piteous, lined face upon the pillow and the hopeless suffering of the eyes that looked forth from it.

She held Isabel’s hand very tightly, though its terrible emaciation shocked her anew, and so for a time they were silent while Isabel seemed to drift back again into the limitless spaces out of which Dinah’s coming had for a moment called her.

It was Biddy who broke the silence at last, laying a gnarled and quivering hand upon Dinah as she sat.

“Ye’d better come again in the morning, mavourneen,” she said.  “She’s too far off to-night to heed ye.”

Dinah started.  Her eyes were full of tears as she bent and kissed the poor, wasted fingers she held, realizing with poignant certainty as she did it the truth of the old woman’s statement.  Isabel was too far off to heed.

Then, as she rose to go, a strange thing happened.  The tender strains of a waltz, Simple Aveu, floated softly in broken snatches in on the west wind, and again—­as one who hears a voice that calls—­Isabel came back.  She raised herself suddenly.  Her face was alight, transfigured—­the face of a woman on the threshold of Love’s sanctuary.

“Oh, my dearest!” she said, and her voice thrilled as never Dinah had heard it thrill before.  “How I have waited for this!  How I have waited!”

She stretched out her arms in one second of rapture unutterable; and then almost in the same moment they fell.  The youth went out of her, she crumpled like a withered flower.

“Biddy!” she said.  “Oh, Biddy, tell them to stop!  I can’t bear it!  I can’t bear it!”

Dinah went to the window and closed it, shutting out the haunting strains.  That waltz meant something to her also, something with which for the moment she felt she could not cope.