n by such a man as Kirby would be of use to his country, and her voice,
against herself, was for England.

It broke her heart. If she failed to 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;