d.

The words she would have spoken expired in a quick-drawn breath. Her
husband, with face of deathlike pallor and silvered hair abroad upon
the pillow, lay upon the poor couch, still in his yesterday attire,
but covered carefully with a cloak. His breast rose and fell
peacefully with his regular breath.

The scorn with which she had looked at Miss O'Donoghue now shot forth
a thousand times intensified from Molly's circled eyes upon the
prostrate figure.

"Asleep!" she cried.

And then with that incongruity with which things trivial and
irrelevant come upon us, even in the supremest moments of life, the
thought struck her sharply how old a man he was. Her lip curved.

"Yes, My Lady--asleep," answered Rene steadily--it seemed as if the
faithful peasant had read her to her soul. "Thank God, asleep. It is
enough to have to lose one good gentleman from the world this day. If
his honour were not sleeping at last, I should not answer for him--I
who speak to you. I took upon myself to put some of the medicine, that
he has had to take now and again, when his sorrows come upon him and
he cannot rest, into his soup last night. It has had a good effect.
His honour will sleep three or four hours still, and that, My Lady,
must be. His honour has suffered enough these last days, God knows!"

The wife turned away with an impatient gesture.

"Look, Madame, at his white hairs. All white now--they that were of a
brown so beautiful, all but a few locks, only a few months past! Well
may he look old. When was ever any one made to suffer as he has been,
in only forty years of life? Ah, My Lady, we were at least tranquil
upon our island!"

There was a volume of reproach in the quiet simplicity of the words,
though Lady Landale was too bent on her own purpose to heed them. But
she felt that they lodged in her mind, that she would find them there
later; but not now--not now.

"It is to be for nine o'clock, you know," she said, with desperate
calmness. "I must see him again. I must see him well. Alone I shall
not be able to get a good place in the crowd. Oh, I would see all!"
she added, with a terrible laugh.

Rene cast a glance at his master's placid face.

"I am ready to come with My Lady," he said then, and took his hat.

A turbulent, tender April day it was. Gusts of west wind, balmy and
sweet with all the sweet budding life of the fields beyond, came
eddying up the dusty streets and blowing merrily into the faces of the
hol