ver been unkind to her,
or thought unkindly of her. If he had never loved her, he had, at
least, been tolerant. But now, clinging to her as the representative of
fortune, happiness, social status, he felt that she was assuredly his
best and dearest upon earth.

"To think that you never really cared for me!" she whimpered; "that you
married me for the sake of this house, and my income!"

"Pamela, do you remember what Tom Jones said to his mistress when she
pretended to doubt his love?"

"My dear Conrad, I never read 'Tom Jones,' I have heard dear Edward
talk of it as if it was something too dreadful."

"Ah, I forgot. Of course, it is not a lady's book. Tom told his Sophia
to look in the glass, if she were inclined to question his love for
her, and one look at her own sweet face would convince her of his
truth. Let it be so with yourself, dear. Ask yourself why I should not
love the sweetest and most lovable of women."

If sugarplums of speech, if loverlike attentions could have cured
Pamela Winstanley's mortal sickness, she might yet have recovered. But
the hour had gone by when such medicaments might have prevailed. While
the Captain had shot, and hunted, and caught mighty salmon, and
invested his odd hundreds, and taken his own pleasure in various ways,
with almost all the freedom of bachelor life, his wife had, unawares,
been slowly dying. The light had burned low in the socket; and who
shall reillumine that brief candle when its day is over? It needed now
but a breath to quench the feeble flame.

"Great Heaven!" cried Captain Winstanley, pacing up and down his study,
distraught with the pangs of wounded self-interest; "I have been taking
care of her money, when I ought to have taken care of her. It is her
life that all hangs upon: and I have let that slip through my fingers
while I have planned and contrived to save a few beggarly hundreds.
Short-sighted idiot that I have been! Poor Pamela! And she has been so
yielding, so compliant to my every wish! A month--a week, perhaps--and
she will be gone: and that handsome spitfire will have the right to
thrust me from this house. No, my lady, I will not afford you that
triumph. My wife's coffin and I will go out together."

CHAPTER X.

"All the Rivers run into the Sea."

For some days Violet's return seemed to have a happy effect upon the
invalid. Never had daughter been more devoted, more loving, fuller of
sweet cares and consolations for a dying mother, tha