e, to divide the two others; likely to be fatal to her or to
them: to her, she hoped, if the choice was to be: and beneath the leaden
hope, her heart set to a rapid beating, a fainter, a chill at the core.

She snatched for breath. She shut her eyes, and with open lips, lay
waiting; prepared to thank the kindness about to hurry her hence, out of
the seas of pain, without pain.

Then came sighs. The sad old servant in her bosom was resuming his
labours.

But she had been near it--very near it? A gush of pity for Victor,
overwhelmed her hardness of mind.

Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and tottered to the
door, touched along to the stairs, and descended them, thinking strangely
upon such a sudden weakness of body, when she would no longer have
thought herself the weak woman. Her aim was to reach the library. She sat
on the stairs midway, pondering over the length of her journey: and now
her head was clearer; for she was travelling to get Railway-guides, and
might have had them from the hands of a footman, and imagined that she
had considered it prudent to hide her investigation of those books:
proofs of an understanding fallen backward to the state of infant and
having to begin our drear ascent again.

A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her. She betrayed no infirmity
of footing as she walked past Arlington in the hall; and she was alive to
the voice of Skepsey presently on the door-steps. Arlington brought her a
note.

Victor had written: 'My love, I dine with Blathenoy in the City, at the
Walworth. Business. Skepsey for clothes. Eight of us. Formal. A thousand
embraces. Late.'

Skepsey was ushered in. His wife had expired at noon, he said; and he
postured decorously the grief he could not feel, knowing that a lady
would expect it of him. His wife had fallen down stone steps; she died in
hospital. He wished to say, she was no loss to the country; but he was
advised within of the prudence of abstaining from comment and trusting to
his posture, and he squeezed a drop of conventional sensibility out of
it, and felt improved.

Nataly sent a line to Victor: 'Dearest, I go to bed early, am tired. Dine
well. Come to me in the morning.'

She reproached herself for coldness to poor Skepsey, when he had gone.
The prospect of her being alone until the morning had been so absorbing a
relief.

She found a relief also in work at the book of the trains. A walk to the
telegraph-station strengthened