Her letter and his life ended together; dawn made the candle-light ghastly; a few moments later the rumble of the dead waggon sounded in the court below.

The driver came early because there was a good deal of freight for his waggon that day.

A few moments afterward the detail arrived with the stretchers, and Ailsa stood up, drew aside the screen, and went down into the gray obscurity of the court-yard.
Grave-diggers were at work on a near hillside; she could hear the clink clink of spade and pick; reveille was sounding from hill to hill; the muffled stirring became a dull, sustained clatter, never ceasing around her for one instant.
A laundress was boiling clothing over a fire near by; Ailsa slipped off her gingham overdress, unbound the white turban, and tossed them on the grass near the fire.

Then, rolling back her sleeves, she plunged her arms into a basin of hot water in which a little powdered camphor was floating.
While busy with her ablutions the two new nurses arrived, seated on a battery limber; and, hastily drying her hands, she went to them and welcomed them, gave them tea and breakfast in Dr.West's office, and left them there while she went away to awake Celia and Letty, pack her valise for the voyage before her, and write to Berkley.
But it was not until she saw the sun low in the west from the deck of the _Mary Lane_, that she at last found a moment to write.
The place, the hour, her loneliness, moved depths in her that she had never sounded--moved her to a recklessness never dreamed of.
It was an effort for her to restrain the passionate confessions trembling on her pen's tip; her lips whitened with the cry struggling for utterance.
"Dear, never before did I so completely know myself, never so absolutely trust myself to the imperious, almost ungovernable tide which has taken my destiny from the quiet harbour where it lay, and which is driving it headlong toward yours.
"You have left me alone, to wonder and to wonder.

And while isolated, I stand trying to comprehend why it was that your words separated our destinies while your arms around me made them one.