lifting, tall and strong, so as to be efficient in supporting, and then Armine and he understood one another.  They had never been special companions; John had too much of the Kencroft muscularity about him to accord with a delicate, imaginative being like Armine, but they respected one another, and made common cause, and John had more than once been his little cousin’s protector.  So when they were so much alone that all reserves were overcome, Armine had comfort in his cousin that no one else in the place could have afforded him.  The little boy perfectly knew how ill he was, and as he lay in John’s arms, breathed out his messages to Babie as well as he could utter them.

“And please, you’ll be always mother’s other son,” said Armine.

“Won’t I?  She’s been the making of me every way,” said John.

“If ever-—she does want anybody-—” said Armine, feeling, but not uttering, a vague sense of want of trust in others around her.

“I will, I will.  Why, Armie, I shall never care for any one so much.”

“That’s right.”

And again, after an interval, Armine spoke of Jock, saying, “You’ll help him, Johnny.  You know sometimes he can be put in mind—-”

John promised again, perhaps less hopefully, but he saw that Armine hoped.

“Would you mind reading me a Psalm,” came, after a great struggle for breath.  “It was so nice to know Babie was saying her Psalms at night, and thinking of us.”

So the evening wore away and night came on, and John, after full six-and-twenty hours’ wakeful exertion and anxiety, began to grow sleepy, and dozed even as he held his cousin whenever the cough did not shake the poor little fellow.  At last, with Armine’s consent, or rather, at his entreaty, Mr. Graham, though knowing himself a bad substitute, took him from the arms of the outwearied lad, who, in five minutes more, was lying, dressed as he was, in the soundest of dreamless slumbers.

When he awoke, the sun was up, an almost midsummer sun, streaming on the fast-melting snow with a dazzling brilliancy.  Armine was panting under the same deadly oppression on his pillows, and Mother Carey was standing by him, talking to Mr. Graham about despatching a messenger to Leukerbad in search of one of the doctors, who were sure to be found at the baths.  How haggard her face looked, and Armine gasped out—­

“Mother, your hair.”

The snow had been there; the crisp black waves on her brow were quite white.  Jock had fallen into a sort of doze from exhaustion, but moaning all the time.  She could call him no better, and Armine’s sunken face told that he was worse.

John went in search of more hot water, and on the way heard voices which made him call Mr. Graham, who knew more of the vernacular German patois than himself, to understand it.  He thought he had caught something about English, and a doctor at Kandersteg.  It was true.  A guide belonging to the other side of the pass, who had been weather-bound at Kandersteg, had just come up with tidings that an English party were there, who had meant to cross the Gemmi but had given it up, finding it too early in the season for the kranklicher Milord who was accompanied by his doctor.