The Last of Their Race

by Annie S. Swan

He did not pause or falter at the door of the chamber of death, but opened it swiftly, closed it again, and walked to the side of the bed. There, for a moment, he stood in silence. Then Diarmid, listening below, heard a cry which he never forgot. It was that of a soul in an anguish which cannot be uttered.

"Forgive!" was the only word that fell brokenly from his lips as he knelt, sobbing by the bed, and laid his aching and throbbing head on the snow-white gloss of the coverlet.

The dead answered not, nor made any sign. But the peace upon the beautiful old face was that of one who has passed over, and who understands.

CHAPTER XI

VIVIEN

It was three o'clock of the afternoon before Rosmead got back to Achree, and he had not eaten any lunch. In the stable-yard he met his sister Vivien, who had gone round to look at some Aberdeen puppies, arrived that very morning.

"We have been wondering about your absence, Peter," she said with her quiet smile. "Have you had any lunch?"

"None. I have been up at the Lodge of Creagh. The old General is dead. Come back to the house, and I will tell you about it."

A groom came forward to take the horse, and Rosmead, linking his arm in his sister's, walked her away. They were devotedly attached to each other, and the wreckage of his dear and beautiful sister's life at the hands of an unprincipled man had cast a deep cloud over Rosmead which could never wholly be lifted. For every time he looked at her face, every time he thought of the possibilities of her kind nature and of the long years of loneliness in front of her his soul was filled with a holy rage. On such occasions he would have killed his brother-in-law, and thought this no sin.

Vivien Rosmead, made for love, uniting in her sweet nature all that is best in womanhood, all that makes for the precious things of life, had been cheated on its very threshold. But why had she been so blind, you ask? Why had not her finer sense warned her of the risk she ran? The answer is the one which has come from the lips of a vast army of sad women who have believed that their love could win and keep a man from his evil ways. In this some few have succeeded but a multitude have failed. Vivien had failed, and the irony and the misery of it had embittered Peter Rosmead beyond all telling.