nature, that, after all, he owed this notable enlargement of interests and opportunity—not to mention those material advantages of houses, lands, and costly furnishings which had come to him. Gratitude was very much in place; and it seemed to him that a silent vigil in that stately bed-chamber would be only fitting, both as an act of piety, and as testimony to the gratitude now no longer permitted expression either in spoken word or kindly act. Nor could Laurence help hoping that during those solemn hours he might arrive at a clear determination regarding the future—ceasing merely to drift passive and acquiescent to the push of circumstance, as a rudderless boat to the push of the tide. He would direct his own course, be master of his own action, prepared to take—for good or ill—all the consequences that action might involve. For, all the while—and it was worse than useless to shirk remembrance of that—all the while, across the Atlantic, under the bright American skies, bright as they, immediate and modern as the civilisation on which they look down, was the vivacious, young, society beauty, whom he had believed he loved, whom he very certainly had married, and to whom—in the opinion of both her world and his own—his honour and his whole future stood pledged. The question of Virginia—for the whole situation resolved itself fundamentally into that—the question of Virginia must be reckoned with, and the results of such reckoning accepted once and for all.

He had not visited that upstairs room since the night of his uncle's death. The impression then received of the furnace-like fire, and the apparent life and motion of those figures of enslaved and half-bestial womanhood supporting the bed, were still present to his recollection. But now, as he passed into the room, he found the change worked there very arresting. All trace of that which had gone forward, earlier in the evening, under the hands of the eminent surgeon, had been obliterated. The room was orderly, stately as ever; but it was very cold. The hearth was swept and empty. One casement stood wide open, and by it entered a continuous breathing of bleak wind. A single electric burner was turned on, and, in the low steady light shed by it, the carven figures of the ebony bed offered no illusion of life or motion; they showed rigid as the long, narrow body they guarded, the angular outline of which was perceptible beneath the fine linen sheet—upon the surface of which sprigs of rosemary and box lay scattered.

Laurence moved across, intending to turn back the upper part of the sheet and look on the face of the dead; but as he did so a bent form rose silently from the armchair, set at right angles to 

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