probably drop around about dawn tomorrow."

"Nice boy!" Her hot hand caught his and held it. "Laurie, if--if--I should send for you suddenly sometime--you'd come and--stand by?"

All the gaiety was wiped from his face. His brilliant black eyes, oddly softened, looked into her haughty blue ones with sudden understanding.

"You bet I will! Any time, anything! You'll remember that? Send for me as if I were Bob. Perhaps you've forgotten it," he added, more lightly, "but I happen to be your younger brother."

For a moment her face twisted. The mask of her arrogance fell from it.

"Bob didn't know," she said. "If he had felt the least suspicion he wouldn't have gone so far, or for so long. I thought I had three or four months--"

Laurie bent and kissed her cheek.

"I'm coming in every day," he said, and abruptly left the room.

In the lower hall he stopped to take in the full real realization of what he had discovered. Louise, superb, arrogant, beautiful Louise, was really ill, desperately ill. A feeling of remorse mingled with his sense of shock. He had believed her a sort of nervous hypochondriac. He had so resented her excessive demands on Barbara that it was only since he had seen much of her in this last month that he had been able whole-heartedly to like and admire her.

As he stood silent, he became conscious of another presence--an august, impressive one, familiar in the past but veiled now, as it were, in a midst of human emotion. It was Jepson, the butler. He coughed humbly.

"Excuse me, sir," he faltered. "But Mrs. Hordway h'ain't quite so well lately, sir. 'Ave you hobserved that?"

Laurie nodded. "I noticed it today," he admitted.

"She's losin' strength very fast, sir. Hall of us 'as seen it. Cook says she don't eat nothink. And Susanne and the nurse says it's 'ard work to get 'er from the bed to 'er chair--"

Laurie checked these revelations.

"Has the doctor been here today?"

"Yessir, two of 'em 'ave been 'ere. Doctor Speyer comes hevery day. This morning 'e brought Doctor Hames again. Hit's very hupsetting, sir, with 'er brother away and hall."

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