But Mrs Sheridan's day of happiness and triumph was soon to draw near
to its close. She saw her husband climb to the dizziest pinnacle of
fame, and she watched with pain his brilliance dimmed, and his
marvellous intellect clouded by excessive drinking, before the fatal
seeds of consumption, which had already carried off her dearly-loved
sister, began to show themselves in her. Her illness was as swift as it
was, happily, painless. She simply drooped and faded and died, tenderly
watched over to the last by her husband with a silent anguish that was
pitiful to see.

"During her last days," says Mrs Canning, her devoted
friend, "she read sometimes to herself, and after dinner
sat down to the piano. She taught Betty (her little
niece) a little while, and played several slow movements
out of her own head, with her usual expression, but with
a very trembling hand. It was so like the last efforts of
an expiring genius, and brought such a train of tender
and melancholy ideas to my imagination, that I thought my
poor heart would have burst in the conflict."

And one June day, when the world she had loved so well was flooded with
a glory of sunlight, her beautiful spirit sped silently away to join the
"choir invisible." Nine days later she was laid to rest in Wells
Cathedral, thousands flocking to pay farewell homage to the closest link
the world has ever known "between an angel and a woman." As for Sheridan
he survived his grief twenty-four years, to end his days in poverty, and
to crown his life's drama with a stately funeral in Westminster Abbey.