have been false, restrained him. And she, respecting what
instinctively she knew to be his feelings, never bade him come
to her. In their letters they never spoke of Rotherby; not
once did his name pass between them; it was as if he had never
lived or never crossed their lives. Meanwhile she weakened
and faded day by day, despite all the care with which she was
surrounded. That winter of cold and want in the Cour des
Miracles had sown its seeds, and Death was sharpening his
scythe against the harvest.

When the end was come she sent urgently for Everard. He came
at once in answer to her summons; but he came too late. She
died the evening before he arrived. But she had left a
letter, written days before, against the chance of his not
reaching her before the end. That letter, in her fine French
hand, was before him now.

"I will not try to thank you, dearest friend," she wrote.
"For the thing that you have done, what payment is there in
poor thanks? Oh, Everard, Everard! Had it but pleased God to
have helped me to a wiser choice when it was mine to choose!"
she cried to him from that letter, and poor Everard deemed
that the thin ray of joy her words sent through his anguished
soul was payment more than enough for the little that he had
done. "God's will be done!" she continued. "It is His will.
He knows why it is best so, though we discern it not. But
there is the boy; there is Justin. I bequeath him to you who
already have done so much for him. Love him a little for my
sake; cherish and rear him as your own, and make of him such a
gentleman as are you. His father does not so much as know of