knocked at her door, she welcomed him to her heart. The first cry of her
child, it is true, made her recall the welcome, but she had to go with
him, notwithstanding, when the child was but an hour old.

Not one of her husband's family was in the house when she died. Sir
Wilton himself was in town, and had been for the last six months,
preferring London and his club to Mortgrange and his wife. When a
telegram informed him that she was in danger, he did go home, but when he
arrived, she had been an hour gone, and he congratulated himself that he
had taken the second train.

There had been betwixt them no approach to union. When what sir Wilton
called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire, with a resentful
feeling that the handsome woman--his superior in everything that belongs
to humanity--had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth was, she had
ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her; it lay in the dulled eye
of the swiftly deteriorating man, which grew less and less capable of
seeing things as they were, and transmitted falser and falser impressions
of them. The light that was in him was darkness. The woman that might
have made a man of him, had there been the stuff, passed from him an
unprized gift, a thing to which he made Hades welcome.

It was decent, however, not to parade his relief. He retired to the
library, lit a cigar, and sat down to wish the unpleasant fuss of the
funeral over, and the house rid of a disagreeable presence. Had the woman
died of a disease to which he might himself one day have to succumb, her
death might, as he sat there, have chanced to raise for an instant the
watery ghost of an emotion; but, coming as it did, he had no sympathetic
interest in her death any more than in herself. Lolling in the easiest of
chairs, he revolved the turns of last night's play, until it occurred to