The Bishop went up to Dick and put his arm round his shoulders.  Two tears of pain were standing in Dick’s hawk-eyes.  He had seen Rachel kiss Hugh’s hands.  He ground his heel against the brick floor.

The Bishop understood, and understood, too, the sudden revulsion of feeling.

“Poor chap!” said Dick, huskily.  “It’s frightful hard luck on him to have to go just when she was to have married him.  If it had been me I could not have borne it; but then I would have taken care I was not drowned.  I’d have seen to that.  But it’s frightful hard luck on him, all the same.”

“I suppose he was taking a short cut across the ice.”

“Yes,” said Dick, “and he got in where any one who knew the look of ice would have known he would be sure to get in.  The keeper watched him cross the ice.  It was some time before they could get near him to get him out, and it seems there is some injury.”

Dr. Brown came slowly out, half closing the parlor door behind him.

“I can do nothing more,” he said.  “If he lived he would have brain fever.  But he is dying.”

“Does he know her?”

“No.  He may know her at the last, but it is doubtful.  I can do nothing, and I am wanted elsewhere.”

“I will stop,” said the Bishop.

“Shall I take you back?” said Dr. Brown, looking at Dick.  But Dick shook his head.

“I might be of use to her,” he said, when the doctor had gone.

So the two men who loved Rachel sat in impotent compassion in the little kitchen through the interminable hours of the night.  At long intervals the Bishop went quietly into the parlor, but apparently he was not wanted there.  Once he went out and got a fresh candle, and put it into the tin candlestick, and set it among the china ornaments on wool-work mats.

Hugh lay quite still now with his eyes half closed.  His hands lay passive in Rachel’s.  The restless fever of movement was passed.  She almost wished it back, so far, so far was his life ebbing away from hers.

“Hughie,” she whispered to him over and over again.  “I love you.  Do not leave me.”

But he muttered continually to himself and took no heed of her.

At last she gave up the hopeless task of making him hear, and listened intently.  She could make no sense of what he said.  The few words she could catch were repeated a hundred times amid an unintelligible murmur.  The boat, and Loftus, and her own name—­and Crack.  Who was Crack?  She remembered the little dog which had been drowned.  And the lips which were so soon to be silent talked on incoherently while Rachel’s heart broke for a word.

The night was wearing very thin.  The darkness before the dawn, the deathly chill before the dawn were here.  Through the low uncurtained window Rachel could see the first wan light of the new day and the new year.

Perhaps he would know her with the daylight.