for

"Yes, I'll save her for you, answered Henderson, with that final assured confidence which he always used to compel confidence. "Come on back to the house, Hard. It's hour by hour till dawn now." He put his arm through Hardin Shore's arm, and they went into the house together.

Back in the sickroom Henderson, the physician, took up his vigil again alone. He made Hardin Shore wait in an adjoining room with the nurse, and, alone, he sat down beside his patient, the strength of destiny in his eyes. The seconds went by with a little clicking catch in their going, marked by the flicker of her breathing, and she gave no heed to the compulsion in the physician's touch upon her hand. The seconds went by with a little clicking catch in their going, and the physician became the dreamer and began to talk to her, urging himself far out after her, matching the red range of the fever with his own tenacious swiftness: "Come back, come back! We may not stop at the place of dreams! It is all over and ended! Come back!"

Tossing, rocking, her head, with its great, tumbled mass of soft hair, came nearer, and her cheek cradled into the hand that he stretched out supportingly.

"Oh," she cried, "the end of the trail at last? The real?"

He put his hand on her shoulder gently. "The real," he said. The last of all reality, it seemed to him the finish of the wild dream-fancies that had been for him so long the fullest and richest reality.

Her eyes opened, shut, opened and fixed upon him, her tension relaxing, her mind clearing, her breathing quieting, the mystic fever cycle ended.

"Why, it's you, dear old doctorboy!" She had come back, the sane, strong, delicate-fibred woman, who for years had been the flower of his fancy, the root of his morality, his courage!

The craziness, his and the fever's, was a thing of the past, the mad aerial journeying was over, she had come back! The physician was sorry for the dreamer as Henderson laid his hand upon her lips and looked once into her earnest questioning eyes:

"Don't talk; you 're back, that's enough; you 're saved, that 's enough." "It was good of you to save me for Hard," she said softly, brokenly, fast growing drowsy again, but comprehending still. Hardin Shore tipped to the door, his wide face lit with joy, and even as he bent and kissed her forehead worshipfully, his wife was safely sleeping.

Long, quiet days followed, and at the end of one of them, Henderson, still neglectful of his Penangton practice, sat at the window across the room from her bedside. Hardin Shore was in his own room, sleeping off the exhaustion of those weeks of anxiety for which he had been so illy conditioned, and the nurse was out in the young orchard, methodically measuring off her evening exercise. Beyond the window the sun had set, and a soft, thickening gloom lay over the room. Through it the two figures, the woman on the pillow and the man in the chair by the window, were barely visible to each other. She lay with her hands above her head, the new thinness of her face softened by the fall of lace from her wrists. He sat in his chair with his head thrown back wearily, the worn fatigue of his face lifting and floating away like a gossamer whenever his eyes rested upon her. The physician had stayed sorry for the dreamer; the memory of an illusion is hard to bear.

"You are all tired out, " she said.
"You are all wrong," he said.

"Do you hear the sleepy things outside?" she asked. The katydids were crying and the crickets were chirping in a drowsy remoteness. "It's strange to hear things and see things and know them for what they really are.”

He glanced at her comprehendingly, thinking to let her know that he understood the little shock of amusement with which she was finding herself again, but seeing how beautifully her hair lay about her face, and how subtly her grace showed in the languid, swinging movements of her long arms, he was not sure what he had let her know.

“That trail, that tangling trail!" she began next, as though feeling her way, and Henderson sat up and bent forward, his eyes fixed upon her.

"No, not of - not of a sick woman's fancies, need I? Need you?" The voice quivered, and the hand above her head closed tightly. "There was one fancy," she went on, as though to an appointed task, "there was one about the place of dreams at the end of the trail where somebody Hardin, I expect always found me. I ever - did I ever speak of that?" Her intention to define for him their old rightful relations touched him like an accolade, raising him a bewildered

Did

"Why, the trail that we followed, - did it tangle you, too?"

He had a sudden mannish impulse to candor, absolute and entire, "Then there was a trail for you, as for me!" he cried hoarsely, "and you realized, " - he stopped in that impulse to candor, for she had drawn the laces closely about her eyes. Seeing her do that, seeing the hurt to her, he dropped back in his chair with a low, sighing breath. "I understand,” he said, "you need not be afraid."

"My, yes," he answered her evenly, "and next you would cry, 'Hardin ! Hardin!' and we should have to scamper after Hard." The laces pressed close to the eyes and the tight hand relaxed. "Oh, you were a nuisance about Hard,' went on Henderson in a resonant, songful tone now, his eyes flashing fire to the west, "Hardin! Hardin!' you were always crying."

She began to laugh, tremulous with success under her laces. "I suppose it must have been like that. I could n't always tell what I was doing and saying, whose name I was calling, I was whirled about so, it was such a long trail, that old tangler's. But if it did n't tangle you, if you understand" Her slender clasped hands were raised to him, her voice swayed to him with a fine, remote music like a wind-blown bell.

"Yes, I understand. And it did n't tangle me," answered Henderson, folding his arms and striding to the window, where he stood for a moment, a lean young figure, erect and powerful, cleanly cut against the light in the west.

R. E. Young.

"The breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration."— Fra Lippo Lippi.

Not long ago I saw these lines quoted to show the blessedness of sanctuary; quoted with a serious sentimentality which left no room for their more startling significance. The writer drew a parallel between the ruffian sheltered by his church and the soldier sheltered by his flag, forgiven much wrong-doing for the sake of the standard under which he has served and suffered. But Mr. Browning's murderer has not served the church. He is unforgiven, and, let us hope, eventually hanged. In the interval, however, he poses as a hero to the children, and as an object of lively interest to the pious and Mass-going Florentines. A lean monk praying on the altar-steps would have awakened no sentiment in their hearts; yet even the frequency, the cheapness of crime failed to rob it of its lustre. It was not without reason that Plutarch preferred to write of wicked men. He had the pardonable desire of an author to be read.

In these less vivid days we are seldom brought into such picturesque contact with assassins. The majesty of the law is strenuously exerted to shield them from open adulation. We have grown sensitive too, and prone to consider our own safety, which we call the welfare of the public. Some of us believe that criminals are madmen, or sick men, who should be doctored rather than punished. On the whole, our emotions are too complex for the straightforward enjoyment with which our robust ancestors contemplated and often committed deeds of violence. Murder is to us no longer as

I met in Edinburgh a disappointed tourist, a woman and an American,who had spent a long day searching in vain for the house in which Burke and Hare committed their ghastly murders, and for the still more hideous habitation of Major Weir and his sister. She had wandered for hours through the most offensive slums that Great Britain has to show; she had seen and heard and smelt everything that was disagreeable; she had made endless inquiries, and had been regarded as a troublesome lunatic; and all that she might look upon the dilapidated walls, behind which had been committed evils too vile for telling. And this in Edinburgh, the city of great and sombre tragedies, where Mary Stuart held her court, and Montrose rode to the scaffold. With so many dark pages in her chronicles, one has scant need to burrow for ignoble guilt.

There are deeds, however, that have so colored history, stained it so redly, and so imperishably, that their seal is set upon the abodes that witnessed them, and all other associations grow dim and trivial by comparison. The murder of a Douglas or of a Guise by his sovereign is the apotheosis of crime, the zenith of horror. As long as the stones of Stir

ling or of Blois shall hold together, that horror shall be their dower. The walls shriek their tale. They make a splendid and harmonious background for the tragedy that gives them life. They are fitting guardians of their fame. It can never be sufficiently regretted that the murder of Darnley had so mean a setting, and that the methods employed by the murderers have left us little even of that meanness. Some bleak fortress in the north should have sheltered a crime so long impending, and so grimly wrought; but perhaps the paltriness of the victim merited no better mise en scène. The Douglas and the Guise were made of sterner stuff, and the world the tourist world -pays in its vaporing fashion a tribute to their strength. It buys pathetically incongruous souvenirs of the "Douglas room; " and it traces every step by which the great Duke, the head and the heart of the League, went scornfully to his death.

Blois has associations that are not murderous. It saw the solemn consecration of the standard of Joan of Arc, and the splendid feasts which celebrated the auspicious betrothal of Henry of Navarre to his Valois bride. The statue of Louis the Twelfth, "Father of his people," sits stiffly astride of its caparisoned charger above the entrance gate. But it is not upon Joan, nor upon Navarre, nor upon good King Louis that the traveler wastes a thought. The ghosts that dominate the château are those of Catherine de Médicis, of her son, wanton in wickedness, and of the murdered Guise. Castle guides are notoriously short of speech, sparing of time, models of bored indifference. But the guardian of Blois waxes eloquent over the tale he has to tell, and, with the dramatic instinct of his race, strives to put its details vividly before our eyes. He assigns to each assassin his post, shows where the wretched young king concealed himself until the deed was done, and points out the exact spot in the Cabinet Vieux where the first

blow was struck. "Behold the perfect tableau!" he winds up enthusiastically, and we are forced to admit that, as a tableau, it lacks no element of success. Mr. Henry James's somewhat cynical appreciation of this "perfect episode "perfect, from the dramatist's point of view- —recurs inevitably to our minds:

"The picture is full of light and darkness, full of movement, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is the great theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it complete. The insolent prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors of the author of the deed; the admirable execution of the plot; the accumulation of horror in what followed, render it, as a crime, one of the classic things."

Classic surely were the repeated warnings, so determinedly ignored. Cæsar was not more plainly cautioned of his danger than was the Duke of Guise. Cæsar was not more resolved to live his life fearlessly, or to die. Cæsar was not harder to kill. It takes many a dagger stroke to release a strong spirit from its clay.

There were dismal prophecies months ahead, advance couriers of the slowly maturing plot. "Before the year dies, you shall die," was the message sent to the Duke when the States-General were summoned to Blois. His mother, ceaselessly apprehensive, his mistress, Charlotte de Sauves, besought him to leave the château. Nine ominous notes, crumpled bits of paper, each written at the peril of a life, admonished him of his fate. The ninth was thrust into his hand as he made his way for the last time to the Council Chamber. "Le ciel sombre et triste" frowned forebodingly upon him as he crossed the terrace, and La Salle and D'Aubercourt strove even then to turn him back. At the foot of the beautiful spiral staircase sat the jester, Chicot, singing softly under his breath a final word of warning, "Hé, j'ay Guise." He