‘Henry,’ she said, ’I had no idea that you felt such an interest in the matter; I have certainly misjudged your character entirely.  And now, what do you want me to do?’

‘Nobody,’ I said, ’must know of the cross but ourselves.  I want you, mother, to do what I cannot do:  I want you to go on the sands and wait for the turn of the tide; I want you to take the cross from Wynne’s breast, if the body should be exposed, and secure it in secret till it can be replaced in the coffin.’

‘I do this, Henry?’ said my mother, with a look of bewilderment at my earnestness.  ’Yet there is reason in what you say, and grievous as the task would be for me, I must consider it.’

‘But will you engage to do it, mother?’

’Really, Henry, you forget yourself,—­you forget your mother too.  For me to go down to the sands and watch the ebbing of the tide, and then defile myself by touching the body of this wretch, is a task I naturally shrink from.  Still if, on thinking it over, I find it my duty to do it, it will not be needful for me to enter into a compact with my son that my duty to my dead husband shall be performed.  Good-night.  I quite think you will be better in the morning.  I see no signs myself of the fever you seem to dread, and, alas!  I am not, as you know, ignorant of the way in which a fever begins.’

She was going out of the room when I exclaimed, in sheer desperation, ’Mother, I have something else to say to you.  You remember the little girl, the little blue-eyed girl, Wynne’s daughter, who came here once, and you were so kind to her, so gracious and so kind’; and I seized her hand and covered it with kisses, for I was beside myself with alarm lest my one hope should go.’

The sudden little laugh of bitter scorn that came from my mother’s lips, the sudden spasm that shook her frame, the sudden shadow as of night that swept across her features, should at once have hushed my confession.  But I went on:  my tongue would not stop now:  I felt that my eloquence, the eloquence of Winifred’s danger, must conquer, must soften even the hard pride of her race.

‘And she has never forgotten your graciousness to her, mother.’

‘Well?’ said my mother, in a tone whose velvet softness withered me.

’Well, mother, she is in all things the very opposite of her father.  This very night she told me’—­and I was actually on the verge of repeating poor Winifred’s prattle about her resembling her mother, and not her father (for already my brain had succumbed to the force of the oncoming fever, and the catastrophe I was dreading made of me a frank and confiding child).

‘Well?’ said my mother, in a voice softer and more velvety still.  ‘What did she tell you?’

That tone ought to have convinced me of the folly, the worse than folly, of saying another word to her.

‘But I can conquer her,’ I thought; ’I can conquer her yet.  When she comes to know all the piteousness of Winifred’s case, she must yield.’