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I

The little inner hall looked very quiet and fa through her last struggle with herself before the shock of battle The stairs went straight doith the old carpet, up and dohich she had gone a thousand times, with every faint patch and line where it was a little worn at the edges, visible in the la there silent in her white dress, bare-arreat coils on her head, as upright as a lance

Beneath lay the little hall, with the tiger-skin, the red-papered walls, and a few s--an old cloak of hers she used on rainy days in the garden, a straw hat of Laurie's, and a cap or two, hanging on the pegs opposite In front was the door to the outer hall, to the left, that of the s-room The house was perfectly quiet Dinner had been cleared away already through the hatch into the kitchen passage, and the servants' quarters were on the other side of the house No sound of any kind ca-room; not even the faint whiff of tobacco-s really seriously within

She did not knohy, she had stopped there, half-way down the stairs

She had dined from a tray in her own room, as she had said; and had been there alone ever since, for the most part at her prie-Dieu, in dead silence, conscious of nothing connected, listening to the occasional tread of a -roo--the ordeal, at the nature of which even now she only half guessed, and she had realized nothing, fors were so wholly out of her experience that she had no process whereby to deal with theain before her consciousness--Courage and Love

She looked again at the door

Laurie was there, she said Then she questioned herself Was it Laurie?

"He is there, underneath," she whispered to herself softly; "he is waiting for me to help him" She remembered that she must make that act of faith Yet was it Laurie who had looked in at his mother's door? Well, the door was locked now But that secretive visit seemed to her terrible

What, then, did she believe?

She had put that question to herself fifty times, and found no answer The old h now: he believed no less than that out of that infinitely mysterious void that lies beyond the veils of sense there had co to degrade, seizing upon this lad's soul, in the disguise of a dead girl, and desiring to possess it How fantastic that sounded! Did she believe it? She did not know Then there was the solution of a nervous strain, rising to a clie doctor Did she believe that? Was that enough to account for the look in the boy's eyes? She did not know