course?'

He lowered his voice with young importance, speaking almost in a whisper,
though the advancing party were still far away. Lucy shook her head.

'Well, it's a ghastly tale, and I've only a minute.--Her husband, you see,
had pneumonia--they were in Switzerland together, and he'd taken a chill
after a walk--and one night he was raving mad, mad you understand with
delirium and fever--and poor Eleanor was so ill, they had taken her away
from her husband, and put her to bed on the other side of the hotel.--And
there was a drunken nurse--it's almost too horrible, isn't it?--and while
she was asleep Mr. Burgoyne got up, quite mad--and he went into the next
room, where the baby was, without waking anybody, and he took the child out
asleep in his arms, back to his own room where the windows were open, and
there he threw himself and the boy out together--headlong! The hotel was
high up,--built, one side of it, above a rock wall, with a stream below
it.--There had been a great deal of rain, and the river was swollen. The
bodies were not found for days.--When poor Eleanor woke up, she had lost
everything.--Oh! I dare say, when the first shock was over, the husband
didn't so much matter--he hadn't made her at all happy.--But the child!'--

He stopped, Mrs. Burgoyne's gay voice could be heard as she approached.
All the elegance of the dress was visible, the gleam of a diamond at the
throat, the flowers at the waist. Lucy Foster's eyes, dim with sudden
tears, fastened themselves upon the slender, advancing form.




CHAPTER IV