o receive the regular letter, she
pined and was disconsolate. He has heard more of me! was in her mind.
Her husband sat looking at her with his old large grey glassy eyes.
You would have fancied him awaiting her death as the signal for his own
release. But she, poor mother, behind her weeping lids beheld her son's
filial love of her wounded and bleeding. When there was anything to be
done for her, old Kirby was astir. When it was nothing, either in
physic or assistance, he was like a great corner of rock. You may
indeed imagine grief in the very rock that sees its flower fading to
the withered shred. On the last night of her life this old man of past
ninety carried her in his arms up a flight of stairs to her bed.

A week after her burial, Kirby was found a corpse in the mountain
forest. His having called the death of his darling his lightning-stroke
must have been the origin of the report that he died of lightning. He
touched not a morsel of food from the hour of the dropping of the sod on
her coffin of ebony wood. An old crust of their mahogany bread, supposed
at first to be a specimen of quartz, was found in one of his coat
pockets. He kissed his girl Carinthia before going out on his last
journey from home, and spoke some wandering words. The mine had not been
worked for a year. She thought she would find him at the mouth of the
shaft, where he would sometimes be sitting and staring, already dead at
heart with the death he saw coming to the beloved woman. They had to let
her down with ropes, that she might satisfy herself he was not below.
She and her great dog and a faithful man-servant discovered the body in
the forest. Chillon arrived from England to see the common grave of both
his parents.

And now good-bye to sorrow for a while. Keep your tears for the living.
And first I am going to describe to you the young Earl of Fleetwood, son
of the strange Welsh lady, the richest nobleman of his time, and how
he persued and shunned the lady who had fascinated him, Henrietta, the
daughter of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham; and how he met Carinthia Jane;
and concerning that lovely Henrietta and Chillon Kirby-Levellier; and of
the young poet of ordinary parentage, and the giant Captain Abrane, and
Livia the widowed Countess of Fleetwood, Henrietta's cousin, daughter of
Curtis Fakenham; and numbers of others; Lord Levellier, Lord Brailstone,
Lord Simon Pitscrew, Chumley Potts, young Ambrose Mallard; and the
English pugilist, s