“You are his sister?” she said.

“Yes.”

She searched Alison’s face, wistfully.

“I could have loved you.”

“And can you not—­still?”

Kate Mercy did not answer the question.

“It is because you understand,” she said.  “You’re like those I’ve come to know—­here.  And you’re like him . . . .  I don’t mean in looks.  He, too, was good—­and square.”  She spoke the words a little defiantly, as though challenging the verdict of the world.  “And he wouldn’t have been wild if he could have got going straight.”

“I know,” said Alison, in a low voice.

“Yes,” said Kate Mercy, “you look as if you did.  He thought a lot of you, he said he was only beginning to find out what you was.  I’d like you to think as well of me as you can.”

“I could not think better,” Alison replied.

Kate Mercy shook her head.

“I got about as low as any woman ever got,” she said

“Mr. Hodder will tell you.  I want you to know that I wouldn’t marry —­your brother,” she hesitated over the name.  “He wanted me to—­he was mad with me to night, because I wouldn’t—­when this happened.”

She snatched her hand free from Alison’s, and fled out of the room, into the hallway.

Eldon Parr had moved towards the bed, seemingly unaware of the words they had spoken.  Perhaps, as he gazed upon the face, he remembered in his agony the sunny, smiling child who need to come hurrying down the steps in Ransome Street to meet him.

In the library Mr. Bentley and John Hodder, knowing nothing of her flight, heard the front door close on Kate Marcy forever . . . .

CHAPTER XXVIII

LIGHT

I

Two days after the funeral, which had taken place from Calvary, and not from St. John’s, Hodder was no little astonished to receive a note from Eldon Parr’s secretary requesting the rector to call in Park Street.  In the same mail was a letter from Alison.  “I have had,” she wrote, “a talk with my father.  The initiative was his.  I should not have thought of speaking to him of my affairs so soon after Preston’s death.  It seems that he strongly suspected our engagement, which of course I at once acknowledged, telling him that it was your intention, at the proper time, to speak to him yourself.

“I was surprised when he said he would ask you to call.  I confess that I have not an idea of what he intends to say to you, John, but I trust you absolutely, as always.  You will find him, already, terribly changed.  I cannot describe it—­you will see for yourself.  And it has all seemed to happen so suddenly.  As I wrote you, he sat up both nights, with Preston—­he could not be induced to leave the room.  And after the first night he was different.  He has hardly spoken a word, except when he sent for me this evening, and he eats nothing . . . .  And yet, somehow, I do not think that this will be the end.  I feel that he will go on living. . . . .