“‘Because my step-mother expects me to,’ she cried, ’and I have no other will than hers.  When I was a little, little child, my father made me promise that if I ever came to live with her I would obey her simplest wish.  And I always have.  I will not disappoint the trust he put in me.’

“‘Even if you die of it?’

“I do not know whether I whispered these words or only thought them.  She answered as though I had spoken.

“’I am not afraid to die.  I am more afraid to live.  She may ask me some day to do something I feel to be wrong.’

“When I fled down the hall that night, I heard one of the small clocks speak to me.  Tell! it cried, tell! tell! tell! tell!  I rushed away from it with beaded forehead and rising hair.

“Then another’s note piped up.  No it droned.  No! no! no! no!  I stopped and took heart.  Disgrace the woman I loved, on the brink of the grave?  I—­, who asked no other boon from heaven than to see her happy, gracious, and good?  Impossible.  I would obey the great clock’s voice; the others were mere chatterboxes.

“But it has at last changed its tune, for some reason, quite changed its tune.  Now, it is Yes!  Yes! instead of No! and in obeying it I save Helena.  But what of Bella? and O God, what of myself?”

A sigh, a groan, then a long and heavy silence, into which there finally broke the pealing of the various clocks striking the hour.  When all were still again and Violet had drawn aside the portiere, it was to see the old man on his knees, and between her and the thin streak of light entering from the hall, the figure of the doctor hastening to Helena’s bedside.

When with inducements needless to name, they finally persuaded the young girl to leave her unholy habitation, it was in the arms which had upheld her once before, and to a life which promised to compensate her for her twenty years of loneliness and unsatisfied longing.

But a black shadow yet remained which she must cross before reaching the sunshine!

It lay at her step-mother’s door.

In the plans made for Helena’s release, Mrs. Postlethwaite’s consent had not been obtained nor was she supposed to be acquainted with the doctor’s intentions towards the child whose death she was hourly awaiting.

It was therefore with an astonishment, bordering on awe, that on their way downstairs, they saw the door of her room open and herself standing alone and upright on the threshold—­she who had not been seen to take a step in years.  In the wonder of this miracle of suddenly restored power, the little procession stopped,—­the doctor with his hand upon the rail, the lover with his burden clasped yet more protectingly to his breast.  That a little speech awaited them could be seen from the force and fury of the gaze which the indomitable woman bent upon the lax and half-unconscious figure she beheld thus sheltered and conveyed.  Having but one arrow left in her exhausted quiver, she launched it straight at the innocent breast which had never harboured against her a defiant thought.