er one breast. "Come: lie on
my heart," she murmured with a smile of holy sweetness.

He wavered more, and drooped to her, but summoning the powers of hell,
kissed her suddenly, cried the words of parting, and hurried to the door.
It was over in an instant. She cried out his name, clinging to him
wildly, and was adjured to be brave, for he would be dishonoured if he
did not go. Then she was shaken off.

Mrs. Berry was aroused by an unusual prolonged wailing of the child,
which showed that no one was comforting it, and failing to get any answer
to her applications for admittance, she made bold to enter. There she saw
Lucy, the child in her lap, sitting on the floor senseless:--she had
taken it from its sleep and tried to follow her husband with it as her
strongest appeal to him, and had fainted.

"Oh my! oh my!" Mrs. Berry moaned, "and I just now thinkin' they was so
happy!"

Warming and caressing the poor infant, she managed by degrees to revive
Lucy, and heard what had brought her to that situation.

"Go to his father," said Mrs. Berry. "Ta-te-tiddle-te-heighty-O! Go, my
love, and every horse in Raynham shall be out after 'm. This is what men
brings us to! Heighty-oighty-iddlety-Ah! Or you take blessed baby, and
I'll go."

The baronet himself knocked at the door. "What is this?" he said. "I
heard a noise and a step descend."

"It's Mr. Richard have gone, Sir Austin! have gone from his wife and
babe! Rum-te-um-te-iddledy--Oh, my goodness! what sorrow's come on us!"
and Mrs. Berry wept, and sang to baby, and baby cried vehemently, and
Lucy, sobbing, took him and danced him and sang to him with drawn lips
and tears dropping over him. And if the Scientific Humanist to the day of
his death forgets the sight of those two poor true women jigging on their
wretched hearts to calm the child, he must have very little of the human
in him.

There was no more sleep for Raynham that night.

CHAPTER XLV

"His ordeal is over. I have just come from his room and seen him bear the
worst that could be. Return at once--he has asked for you. I can hardly
write intelligibly, but I will tell you what we know.

"Two days after the dreadful night when he left us, his father heard from
Ralph Morton. Richard had fought a duel in France with Lord Mountfalcon,
and was lying wounded at a hamlet on the coast. His father started
immediately with his poor wife, and I followed in company with his aunt
and his child. The wound was not