"What!" the woman cried; "him as deserted her so cruel, and left her
with her pretty boy upon her poor old father's hands, which Captain
Maldon has told me often, with the tears in his poor eyes?"

"I did not desert her," George cried out; and then he told the history
of his three years' struggle.

"Did she speak of me?" he asked; "did she speak of me--at--at the last?"

"No, she went off as quiet as a lamb. She said very little from the
first; but the last day she knew nobody, not even her little boy, nor
her poor old father, who took on awful. Once she went off wild-like,
talking about her mother, and about the cruel shame it was to leave her
to die in a strange place, till it was quite pitiful to hear her."

"Her mother died when she was quite a child," said George. "To think
that she should remember her and speak of her, but never once of me."

The woman took him into the little bedroom in which his wife had died.
He knelt down by the bed and kissed the pillow tenderly, the landlady
crying as he did so.

While he was kneeling, praying, perhaps, with his face buried in this
humble, snow-white pillow, the woman took something from a drawer. She
gave it to him when he rose from his knees; it was a long tress of hair
wrapped in silver paper.

"I cut this off when she lay in her coffin," she said, "poor dear?"