drew his face down to hers again—­“but only once—­to—­you—­and then, well then, to die, and have done with it.  You see, I knew one can’t get on long with three-quarters of a lung.  And they were rather tiresome—­they didn’t understand.  So three weeks ago I drew some money out and said good-bye to them.  Oh! they were very kind, and very sorry for me.  They wanted me to take a maid, and I meant to.  But the one they found wouldn’t come with me when she saw how ill I was—­and it all lingered on—­so one day I just walked out to the railway-station and went to Paris.  But Paris was rainy—­and I felt I must see the sun again.  So I stayed two nights at a little hotel maman used to go to—­horrid place!—­and each night I read your speeches in the reading-room—­and then I got my things from Poitiers, and started—­”

A fit of coughing stopped her, coughing so terrible and destructive that he almost rushed for help.  But she restrained him.  She made him understand that she wanted certain remedies from her own room across the corridor.  He went for them.  The door of this room had been shut by the observant Dell, who was watching the passage from his own bedroom farther on.  When Ashe had opened it he found himself face to face as it were with the foaming stream outside.  The window, as he had seen it before, was wide open to the water-fall just beyond it, and the temperature was piercingly cold and damp.  The furniture was of the roughest, and a few of Kitty’s clothes lay scattered about.  As he fumbled for a light, there hovered before his eyes the remembrance of their room in Hill Street, strewn with chiffons and all the elegant and costly trifles that made the natural setting of its mistress.

He found the medicines and hurried back.  She feebly gave him directions.  “Now the strychnine!—­and some brandy.”

He did all he could.  He drew some chairs together before the fire, and made a couch for her with pillows and rugs.  She thanked him with smiles, and her eyes followed his every movement.

“Tell your man to get some milk!  And listen”—­she caught his hand.  “Lock my door.  That nice woman down-stairs will come to look after me, and she’ll think I’m asleep.”

It was done as she wished.  Ashe took in the milk from Dell’s hands, and a fresh supply of wood.  Then he turned the key in his own door and came back to her.  She was lying quiet, and seemed revived.

“How cosey!” she said, with a childish pleasure, looking round her at the bare white walls and scoured boards warmed with the fire-light.  The bitter tears swam in Ashe’s eyes.  He fell into a chair on the other side of the fire, and stared—­seeing nothing—­at the burning logs.