“Perhaps you can guess why I’ve called you up....  Though, you know, it was to be a secret unless you saw me again, and I really don’t count a letter as seeing!...”

“I didn’t see you,” came back the unfamiliar voice.  “I am to blame.”

“Ah, but the letter was just as good,” said Carlisle, and laughed excitedly into the transmitter.  And then, having never admitted any particular sense of guilt, having felt almost no “conviction of sin” as religious fellows would term it, she went on without the smallest embarrassment:  “You see, I flew into a panic for some reason, and didn’t mean for you ever to see me again.  I ran away!  And then I couldn’t get his letter out of mind—­I’d never taken it in that he was so miserable, really!—­and I was quite ashamed of being such a coward.  And so,” she said, the upward-lifting lip pressing the instrument in her eagerness, “I’ve called up now to say I want—­”

His voice broke in, not with the burst of praise and thanksgiving she had looked for, but only to say abruptly and anti-climacterically: 

“I can’t hear you.  Will you say that again?”

However, but few words were needed, after all, to ring this climax.  Carlisle said, slowly and distinctly: 

“I say I want you to tell Mr. Dalhousie now—­and his father, too.  To-night, if you wish.”

Then there was a desolating silence, out of which she heard something far off like a man groaning.

“Hello!” she called sharply.  “Are you there?”

“Where are you, Miss Heth?” was Dr. Vivian’s reply; and his voice was like the voice of the man who had groaned....

“Are you in your room at the hotel?  Is your mother with you there?”

Singular words these, from the receiver of confidences and high favors.  There fell upon Cally a nameless fear.

“N-no—­I’m alone—­Why, what—­”

“Could I speak to your mother a moment—­first?  I have some bad news.  It would be better—­”

“No—­tell me!  My mother’s at dinner.  I—­what are you talking about?...”

Had he betrayed her already, then?  Was the town now ringing with her name?  Had Colonel Dalhousie ...

Quite distinctly, though he evidently was not addressing her, she heard the man’s hard voice say:  “This cannot be borne.”

And then in a different voice, there came these words over the miles from Meeghan’s Grocery: 

“Miss Heth;—­I didn’t see you when I should have—­and now we are just too late.  I can’t reach Dal now.”

“You—­don’t mean?...”

“He is dead.”

"Dead!"

And it was this girl’s shame, the fruit of her long fear, that her first feeling was one of base relief.  So works Nature’s first law.  Dal was dead; all was settled; there was nothing to tell now.  And then, as by the turning of a corner, she came front to front with a sudden horror, and there unrolled before her a moment of blackness....