CHAPTER XXXIV. CONCLUSION.

Our passage home was extraordinarily long. It took us seventy-five days to arrive at the English Channel from the latitude of the volcanic island. The captain thought himself under a spell, and swore that he believed his barque was to be made a ‘Flying Dutchman’ of. Yet she was a clipper keel, moulded in exquisite con[349]formity with all theories of swiftness in sailing, and when a fresh and favourable wind blew she ate through it as though with the iron bite of a powerful steamer. But had she spread the canvas of a ‘Royal George’ over the hull of a racing yacht she could have done nothing in the face of the dead calms and light baffling breezes which held us motionless or sent us sliding southwards for days and days. Scarce had we struck soundings indeed—that is to say, hardly had we entered the mouth of the English Channel—when a whole gale of wind blew down upon us from the eastward, and grove us a third of the distance across to the shores of the United States.

How bitterly sick I grew of this time I cannot express. I had lost everything that I had brought with me in the wreck of the ‘Bride,’ and was entirely dependent upon the kindness of the captain and the mates for a supply of the few wants I absolutely required. One lent me a shirt, another a pair of socks, a third a razor, and so on, but it was a miserable existence. A few weeks of it I should have found supportable by comparing the life with the horrors we had been delivered from; but as time went on gratitude languished, the sense of contrast lost something of its edge; I abhorred the recollection of the galleon, yet it really seemed as though we had merely exchanged one form of imprisonment for another; as if old ocean indeed were suffering us to amuse ourselves with a dream of escape, as a cat humours a mouse in that way, to drop with a spring upon us ultimately when she had sickened the patience out of our souls.

I need not say that Lady Monson made the worst of everything. She had to share a cabin with her sister, and to that extent, therefore, was associated with her, but her behaviour to Laura, as to me, was cold, haughty, disdainful. She froze herself from head to foot, gave us a wide berth when on deck, would break away abruptly if one or the other of us endeavoured to engage her in conversation, and was as much alone as she could possibly contrive to be. It is hard to say whether she disliked me more than her sister. Yet I could not but feel sorry for her, heartily as I hated her. What was her future to be? What had life in store for one whose memory was charged as hers was? Laura tried hard to find out what her intentions were, what plans she had formed, but to no purpose. But then it was likely that the woman had not made out any programme for herself.

Both she and my darling were desperately put to it for the want of apparel. Each had but the dress she stood in, for Laura’s box had contained little more than under-linen. They had arrived on board the barque without covering for their heads; but this was remedied by the second mate presenting Laura with a new straw hat, and later on we heard through Finn that one of the crew had a new grass hat in his chest which he desired to present to Lady Monson. I see her ladyship now in that sailor’s hat, over which she tied a long brown veil that had come ashore upon the[350] island in Laura’s box. I witness again the fiery gleam of her black eyes penetrating the thin covering. I behold the captain, with his slow Scotch gaze following her majestic figure as she glides lonely to and fro the deck, seldom daring to address her, and rapidly averting his glance when she chanced to round her face towards him on a sudden. And I see Laura, too, sweet as a poet’s fancy I would sometimes think, in the mate’s straw hat, perched on top of her golden hair, a sailor’s half-fathom of ribbon floating from it down her back, her violet eyes lovely once more with their old tender glow, and with the smiles which sparkled in them and with the love which deepened their hue as she let me look into them.

She had soon regained her health and spirits. I never would have believed that two women born of the same parents could be so absolutely dissimilar as these sisters. Laura made no trouble of anything. She ate the plain cabin food as though she heartily enjoyed it; cooled me down when I was slowly growing mad over some loathsome pause of calm; made light of the embarrassing slenderness of her wardrobe. She had always one answer: ‘This is not the galleon, Charles. We’re bound to England. You must be patient, my dear.’

I remember once saying to her, ‘Your dress is very shabby, my pet. It no longer sits to your figure as it did. It shows like shipwrecked raiment. Salt-water stains are very abundant; and your elbow cannot be long before it peeps out. How, then, is it that I find you more engaging, more lovely, more adorable in this castaway attire than ever I thought you aboard the “Bride,” where probably you had a dozen dresses to wear?’

‘Mere prejudice,’ she answered, laughing and blushing. ‘You will outgrow many opinions of this kind.’

‘No! But don’t you see what a moral shipwreck enables you to point to your sex, Laura?’ said I. ‘Girls will half-ruin their fathers, and wives almost beggar their husbands, for dress. They clothe themselves for men. No doubt you consider yourself wholly dependent for two-thirds of your charms upon dress. All women think thus—the young and the old, the beautiful and the—others. But what is the truth? You become divine in proportion as you grow ragged!’

‘When I am your wife you will not wish that I shall be divine only on the merits of rags,’ said she.

‘Well, my dear,’ said I, ‘old ocean has given me one hint concerning you. Should time ever despoil you of a single charm there is the remedy of shipwreck. We will endeavour to get cast away again.’

Thus idly would we talk away the days. No ship ever before held such a pair of spoonies, I dare swear, spite of the traditions of the East India Company. But sweet as our shipboard intercourse was, our arrival in England threatened delays and difficulties. First of all she declared that she could not dream of marrying without her father’s consent. This was, no doubt, as it should be, and surely I could not love her the less for being a good daughter.[351] But the consent of a man who lived in Melbourne, and who had to be addressed from England, signified, in those ambling times, the delay of hard upon a year.

‘A year, Laura!’ I cried on one occasion whilst debating this subject; ‘think of it! With the chance, perhaps, of your father’s reply miscarrying.’

She sighed. ‘Yes, it is a long time. Oh, if Melbourne were only in Europe. Yet it cannot be helped, Charles.’

‘But, my heart’s delight,’ I exclaimed, ‘Why should not we get married first and then write for your father’s consent?’

No; she must have her papa’s sanction.

‘All right, birdie,’ said I; ‘anyhow you will remain in England till you hear from him, and so we shall be together.’

‘It might shorten the time,’ she said with a little blush and a timid glance at me under the droop of her eyelids, ‘if you and I sailed to Melbourne.’

‘It would, my precious!’ I answered; ‘but suppose on your introducing me your father should object?’

‘Oh no, Charles, he will not object,’ she exclaimed with a confident shake of the head.

‘In fact then, Laura,’ said I, ‘you are sure your papa will sanction our marriage?’

‘Quite sure, dear.’

‘Then would it not come to the same thing if we got married on our arrival in England?’

This was good logic, but it achieved nothing for me, and since I saw that her father’s sanction would contribute to the happiness of her married life I never again attempted to reason with her on the subject.

At last, one morning we found ourselves in the English Channel, bowling over the green ridges of it before a strong south-westerly wind, and within fifty hours of making the Lizard Light the brave little barque ‘Star of Peace’ was being warped to her berth in the East India Docks. Down to that very moment, incredible as it may seem, Lady Monson had given neither her sister nor myself the vaguest hint of what she intended to do. As we stood waiting to step ashore she arrived on deck and, approaching Laura, exclaimed,

‘Mr. Monson, I presume, will escort you to an hotel.’

‘Won’t you accompany us, Henrietta?’ her sister asked.

‘No, I choose to be independent. I shall go to such and such an hotel,’ and she named the house at which she had stopped with Colonel Hope-Kennedy when she arrived in London on her way to Southampton. ‘You can address me there, or call upon me, Laura. I have not yet decided on any steps. In all probability I shall return to Melbourne, but not at present.’

She extended her hand coldly to her sister and gave me a haughty bow. Laura bit her lips to restrain her tears, but her pride was stung; disgust and amazement too fell cool upon her grief.

[352]

The last I ever saw of Lady Monson was as she passed along the quay towards the dockyard gates. As she paced forward, stately, slow, her carriage queenly and easy as though, sumptuously clothed and in the full pride of her beauty, she trod the floor of a ball-room, the scores of sailors, labourers, loafers who thronged the decks, turned, to a man, to stare after her. A strange and striking figure indeed she made, habited in the dress which she wore when the ‘Shark’ foundered, and which, as you may suppose, by this time showed very much like the end of a long voyage. The brown veil concealed her features and to a certain degree qualified the outlandish appearance of the sailor’s grass hat upon her head.

‘So!’ said I as she disappeared, ‘and now, Laura, it is for you and me to go ashore.’

We bade a cordial farewell to Captain Richardson and his mates and to Finn and Cutbill, both of whom promised to call upon me. I had the address of the owner of the vessel, and told the skipper that next day I would communicate with the office and defray whatever expenses we had put the ship to. I further took the addresses of the captain and his mates that I might send them some token of my gratitude for our deliverance and for the many kindnesses they had done us during the long and tedious passage.

A few hours later I had comfortably lodged Laura in a snug private hotel within an easy walk of my lodgings, to which I forthwith repaired and took possession of afresh with such an emotion of bewilderment excited in me by the familiar rooms, and by the feeling that I was once more in London, with no more runaway wives to chase, no more Dutchmen to fire into, no more duels to assist in, no more volcanic rocks to split upon, and no more galleons to sleep in, that I felt like a man just awakened from some wild and vivid dream whose impressions continue so acute that the familiar objects his eyes open upon seem as phantasms that must presently fade. My first act was to send a milliner and a dressmaker to Laura, and to see in other ways to her immediate requirements; my next to address a letter to Wilfrid’s solicitors, in which I acquainted them with the loss of the ‘Bride’ and the death of my cousin. Whom else to write to at once about the poor fellow I did not know. I asked after his infant, and requested them to tell me if the child was still with the lady with whom my cousin had placed it before leaving England. I added that I should be pleased to see one of the partners and relate the full story of the voyage, the object of which I could not doubt Wilfrid had informed them of before sailing.

I spent the evening with Laura. All her talk was about what she was to do until she had heard from her father, to whom she told me she had written a long letter within an hour after her arrival at the hotel, ‘so as to lose no time, Charles.’ She had no relations in England, scarcely an acquaintance for the matter of that; with whom was she to live then? Even had Lady Monson[353] settled down in a house she was not a person with whom I could have desired the girl I was affianced to to be long and intimately associated. The notion of her returning to Australia alone was not to be entertained. There seemed nothing then for it but for me to overhaul the list of my connections, to make experiments in the direction of relations, and endeavour to find a home for her with one or another of them until there should some day arrive a mail from Australia giving me leave to take her to my heart.

Well, it was next morning that I had finished breakfast and was sitting musing over a fire with a newspaper on my knee. My mind was full of the past. I remember looking round me almost incredulously with eyes that still found the familiar furniture of my room unreal and indeed almost impossible, listening with ears that could scarcely accept as actual the transformation of the roar and beat and wash of the seas into the steady hum of ceaseless traffic in the great London roadway into which the street I occupied opened. Years had elapsed, it seemed, since that night when my servant had ushered in my cousin, and I saw in fancy the wild roll of his eyes round the apartment, the crazy flourish of his hands, his posture as he sank his head upon the table battling with his sobbing breath.

I was disturbed by a smart knock at the door. ‘Come in.’ The landlord entered; a thin, iron-grey, soft-voiced man, who had for many years been butler in an earl’s family, and who had retired and started a lodging-house on discovering that he had married a woman of genius in the shape of a cook.

‘There’s a person below named Muffin would like to see you, sir.’

I stared at him as if he were mad.

‘Muffin!’ I whispered.

‘That was the name he gave, sir,’ he exclaimed, astonished by my amazement.

‘Muffin!’ I repeated, scarce crediting my hearing; ‘describe him, Mr. Cork.’

‘A clean, yellow-faced man, sir, hair of a coal-blackness, looks down when he speaks, sir, seems a bit shaky in the ankles; a gentleman’s servant, I should say, sir.’

‘Show him up, Mr. Cork!’ I exclaimed, doubting the description as I had the name, so impossible did it seem that this person could be Wilfrid’s valet.

In a few moments the door was opened, and in stepped Muffin!—the Muffin of the ‘Bride,’ Muffin the ventriloquist, Muffin the whipped and ducked, and, as I could have solemnly sworn, Muffin the drowned! He stood before me with the old familiar crook of the left knee, holding his hat with both hands against his stomach, his head drooped, his lips twisted into their familiar grin of obsequious apology. His yellow face shone, his hair was as lustrous as the back of a rook; he wore large loose black-kid gloves, and he was attired in a brand new suit of black cloth. I know nothing in the way of shocks severer for the moment, that tells more startlingly[354] upon the whole nervous system, than the meeting with a man whom one has for months and months believed dead. I was unable to speak for some moments. I shrank back in my chair when he entered, and in that posture eyed him whilst he stood looking downwards, smiling and suggesting in his attitude respectful regret for taking the liberty of intruding.

‘Well,’ said I, fetching a deep breath, ‘and so you are Muffin indeed, eh? Well, well. Why, man, I could have sworn we left you a corpse floating close to a volcanic island near the equator.’

‘So I suppose, sir!’ he exclaimed, ‘but I am thankful to say, sir, that I was not drowned.’

I motioned him to sit; he put his hat under the chair, crossed his legs, and clasped his hands over his knee. A sudden reaction of feeling, supplemented by his strange appearance, produced a fit of laughter in me. The image of his radish-shaped form, half naked, quivering down the ranks of the seamen, with Cutbill grotesquely apparelled compelling him to keep time, recurred to me.

‘You seem resolved that I shall believe in ghosts, Muffin,’ said I; ‘and pray how came you to learn that I was saved from the wreck, that I had returned to England, was here in these lodgings, in short, where I only arrived yesterday?’

‘Sir Wilfrid received a letter from his solicitors this morning, sir, enclosing your letter to them.’

‘Sir Wilfrid!’ I shouted; ‘is he alive?’

‘Oh yes, sir, and very much better both in body and mind, I’m ’appy to say, sir. He would have called on you himself, sir, but he’s suffering from an attack of gout in his left foot, and has been obliged to keep his bed for two days.’

I jumped from my chair and fell to pacing the room to work off by locomotion something of the amazement that threatened to addle my brains.

‘Wilfrid alive!’ I muttered. ‘What will Laura say to all this? Muffin,’ I cried, rounding upon him, ‘what you are telling me is a miracle! a thing beyond all credibility. Why, we saw the yacht go to pieces! nearly the whole mass of her in fragments came ashore, along with four or five dead bodies. How, in heaven’s name, did Sir Wilfrid escape?’

He responded by telling me the story. Johnson, the man who had died upon the island, was perfectly right in saying that he believed a number of men had rushed to one of the boats shortly after the yacht had struck. I myself remember being felled by a gang of people flying aft in the blackness. Muffin was one of them. The white water over the side enabled them to see what they were about. The boat, a noble structure, of a lifeboat’s quality of buoyancy, was successfully lowered, seven men got into her, one of whom was Muffin. The yacht was then fast breaking up. The men, to escape being pounded to pieces by the battering rams of the wreckage hurled on every curl of sea, headed out from the[355] island, straining their hearts at the oars; but they were again and again beaten back. There were but five oars, and Muffin and one of the seamen having nothing to do sat crouching in the stern-sheets. Suddenly a figure showed close alongside crying loudly for help; Muffin grasped him by the hair of his head, the other fellow leaned over, and between them they dragged the man in. It was my cousin! By dint of sustained and mad plying of oars they drew the boat clear of the wreckage, bringing the white line of the thunderous surf on the island beach upon their quarter; they then gave the stern of the little fabric to the wind and seas and fled forwards like smoke, and when the dawn broke they were miles out of sight of the rock. A day and a night of dead calm followed; they were without food or water, and their outlook was horrible; but at sunrise on the third day they spied the gleam of a sail, towards which they rowed, and before the darkness fell they were safely on board a large English brig bound to Bristol.

Such was Muffin’s story. He said that Sir Wilfrid, on being told it was Muffin who had rescued him, promised to take him back into his service on reaching England. He added that my cousin had entirely lost the craze that had possessed him concerning his bulk and stature. The yacht on going to pieces had liberated him, and with his sudden and startling enlargement his mad fancy entirely passed away. So that poor old Jacob Crimp came very near the truth when he had suggested to me that my cousin’s senses might be recovered by a great fright.

Muffin asked me the names of the others who were saved. I told him who they were.

‘And Mr. Cutbill wasn’t drowned, sir?’ said he.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘And Captain Finn is saved too. I’m so glad, sir.’

But the rogue gave me a look that clearly signified he was very sorry indeed.

An hour later I was sitting by my cousin’s bedside. He was stopping at an hotel near Charing Cross. I will say nothing of the warmth of our meeting. The tears were in my eyes as I grasped and retained his hand. He was perfectly rational, had a more sensible look in his face than I had ever witnessed in it, and his memory was as clear as my own. It seemed to me that the shock of shipwreck had worked wonders in him, though to be sure strong traces of congenital weakness were still visible in the quivering eyelids, the occasional, irrelevant, loud laugh, the boyish eagerness of manner, with now and again the passing shadow of a darkening humour. For a long time we seemed able to talk of nothing but the wreck of the ‘Bride’ and of our several experiences. I very delicately and vaguely referred to the delusion that had imprisoned him in his cabin, but his stare of surprise advised me that he had no recollection whatever of his craze, and it was like a warning to me to instantly quit the subject. He told me that Muffin had behaved with a touching devotion to him whilst they were in the[356] boat, pillowing his head when he slept, cooling his hot brow with water, sheltering him from the heat of the sun by standing behind him with his jacket outstretched to the nature of a little awning. He asked tenderly after Laura, and made many inquiries after the men who had been saved, bidding me tell Finn, should he visit me, to call upon him, that he might obtain the names and addresses of the survivors, and enable them to replace the effects they had lost, by the foundering of the yacht.

‘You do not ask after your wife, Wilfrid,’ said I, a little nervously.

‘Oh, you told me she was saved,’ he answered languidly; then after a pause he added, ‘Where is she?’

‘She refused to accompany her sister,’ said I; ‘she loves independence. She has gone alone to such and such an hotel, where I presume she is still to be found.’

His face flushed to the name of that hotel; he instantly remembered. He bent his eyes downwards and said as if to himself,

‘Yes, she is of those who return to their vomit.’

‘What are your plans?’ said I.

‘As regards Lady Monson, do you mean?’

‘Well, she is still your wife, and what concerns her concerns you, I suppose, more or less.’

‘I shall not meddle with her,’ said he, making a horrible grimace to an involuntary twitch of his gouty foot; ‘she can do what she pleases.’

‘She talks of returning to Australia.’

‘Let her go,’ said he.

And this, thought I, is the issue of your wild pursuit of her! Had he but waited a few months, disgust and aversion would have grown strong in him. He would have been guiltless of shedding the blood of a fellow-creature—he would have preserved his noble yacht—but then, to be sure, I should probably never have met Laura!

His eye was upon me while I mused a little in silence.

‘My solicitors advise proceedings in the Divorce Court,’ said he, ‘but I say no. I certainly should never try my hand at marriage again, and therefore a divorce would serve no end of my own. But it might answer her purpose very well indeed; it would free her, and I do not intend that she shall have her liberty.’

‘You will have to maintain her.’

‘Oh, my solicitors will see to that,’ he answered with a curious smile.

‘Wilf,’ said I, ‘she may fall very low, and then, when nobody, else will have anything more to do with her, she will return to you as your lawful wife, and play the devil with your peace and good name.’

‘I am not going to free her,’ said he snappishly.

‘Do you mean to make any stay in London?’ said I.

‘I am waiting till the gout leaves me,’ he answered, ‘and shall[357] then go abroad. I have been recommended to do so. It is pretty sure to come to the ears of Colonel Hope-Kennedy’s friends that I shot him in a duel. He was a widower and childless, but he has a sister, a Lady Guthrie, who adored the ground he trod on and thought him the noblest creature in the universe. My solicitors advise me not to wait until I am charged with the fellow’s death, and so I am going abroad.’

‘Humph,’ said I; ‘and how am I to be dealt with as an accessory?’

‘Pooh!’ he exclaimed, ‘one never hears of seconds being charged.’

‘You will take baby with you, I presume?’

He answered no. During his absence a cousin of his had lost her husband, a colonel in India. She had arrived in England with two grown-up daughters, and was so poor that she had asked Wilfrid to help her. He had arranged that she and the girls should occupy his seat in the North and take charge of his child. This in fact had been settled, and Mrs. Conway and her daughters were now installed at Sherburne Abbey. On hearing this it instantly suggested itself to me that Mrs. Conway would provide Laura with the very home that she needed until we heard from Mr. Jennings. Wilfrid of course acquiesced; he was delighted; he loved Laura as a sister, and his little one would be doubly guarded whilst she was with it. So here was a prompt and happy end to what had really threatened to prove a source of perplexity, and indeed in some senses a real difficulty.

And now to end this narrative. A fortnight later Wilfrid went abroad to travel, as he said, in Italy and the South of France, and with him proceeded Mr. Muffin. During that fortnight Laura and I were frequently with him, but it was only on the day previous to his departure that he mentioned his wife’s name. In a careless voice and offhand manner he asked if we had heard of her, but neither of us could give him any news. We had not chosen to learn by calling if she continued at the hotel to which she had gone on her arrival. She had not written to her sister, nor had she communicated with Wilfrid’s solicitors. However, about a fortnight after I had returned to London from the North, whither I had escorted Laura, there came a letter to my lodgings addressed to my sweetheart. I guessed the handwriting to be Lady Monson’s. I forwarded it to Laura, who returned it to me. It was a cold intimation of her ladyship’s intention to sail in such and such a vessel to Melbourne on the Monday following, so that when I read the missive she had been four days on her way. For my part I was heartily glad to know that she was out of England.

Soon after my arrival I sent a description of the volcanic island and the galleon on top of it to a naval publication of the period. It was widely reprinted and excited much attention and brought me many letters. But for that article I believe I should have heard no more of Dowling and Head. It chanced, however, that[358] my account of the island was republished in a West Indian journal, and I think it was about five months after my return to this country that I received a letter from the master of a vessel dated at the Havannas and addressed to me at the office of the journal in which my narrative had been published. This man, it seems, having sighted the rock about three weeks after we had got away from it in the ‘Star of Peace,’ hauled in close to have a good look at an uncharted spot that was full of the deadliest menace to vessels, and observed signals being made to him from what he was afterwards informed was the hull of a fossilised ship. He sent a boat and brought off two men, who, it is needless to say, were Dowling and Head. They very frankly related their story, told the master of the vessel how they were survivors of the schooner-yacht ‘Bride,’ and how they had declined to leave the island because of their expectation of meeting with treasure aboard that strange old ship of weeds and shells. Day after day they had toiled in her, but to no purpose. They broke into the piles of shells, but found nothing save rottenness within, remains of what might have been cargo but of a character utterly indistinguishable. There was not a ha’p’orth of money or treasure; so there was an end of the poor fellows’ princely dreams. They were received on board and worked their passage to Rio, where they left the ship, which then proceeded to the Havannas.

There can be little doubt that shortly after this the volcanic rock subsided and vanished off the surface of the sea, after the usual manner of these desperate creations. The editor of the naval journal received several copies of logs kept by ships which had traversed the part of the ocean where the island had sprung up, and it was gathered, after a careful comparison of these memoranda, that the rock must have disappeared very shortly after Dowling and Head had been taken off it, for the log-book of a vessel named the ‘Martha Robinson’ showed that three days later she had passed over the exact spot where the island had stood and all was clear sea.

My time of waiting for the hand of Laura was not to prove so long as I had feared. Very unexpectedly one morning I received a letter from my darling from the Abbey. Her father had arrived on the preceding day. She could scarcely believe her ears when a servant came to tell her that Mr. Jennings had called and was waiting to see her. Of course he had not received her letter. He had taken it into his head to visit England, both his daughters being there, mainly with the intention of taking Laura back with him when he returned. He was almost broken-hearted, so Laura wrote, when she told him about Lady Monson. However, he was in England, and after waiting a few days so as to give him time to recover the dreadful shock caused him by the news of his daughter’s behaviour, I went down to Westmoreland, was introduced to the old gentleman, and found him a bluff, hearty, plain-spoken man. He told me he could settle twenty thousand pounds upon his child,[359] and seemed very well satisfied to hear that I was not without a pretty little income of my own. He approached the subject of insanity with a bluntness that somewhat disconcerted me. I assured him that so far as I could possibly imagine I was not mad, that my cousin’s craziness came from a source which did not concern me in the least degree. He was pleased afterwards to tell Laura that he could see by my eye that my intellect was as sound as a bell; an observation upon which I thought I had some right to compliment myself, for to be suspected of being ‘wanting’ is often to involuntarily and unconsciously look so, and I must say that whilst Mr. Jennings and I talked about Wilfrid’s craziness and where it came from, he regarded me with a keenness that was at times not a little embarrassing.

Laura and I had been married two years when we heard of Lady Monson. Mr. Jennings had returned to Australia, but in one or two letters we had received from him he never mentioned Henrietta’s name. Then came a missive in deep mourning. Lady Monson was dead. She had been received into the Roman Catholic Church, so wrote the father in a letter whose every sentence seemed as though he wrote with a pen dipped in his tears. She had, apparently, given up all thoughts of this world and devoted her days and nights to ministering to the poor. One day she returned to her home looking ill; two nights later she was delirious. She broke from the grasp of her attendants and marched with stately step, singing in her rich contralto voice as she went, to an upper chamber that had been Laura’s bedroom, where, planting herself before a mirror, she fell to brushing her rich and beautiful hair, singing all the while, till on a sudden she fell with a shriek to the ground, was carried back to her bed, and two hours later lay a corpse.

The End