, Richard's father. Carew of Crompton died last night."

There was no sorrow in the aged woman's face: a gravity, unmixed with
tenderness, possessed it. Carew was naught to her, and had been naught
for twoscore years. But the tide of memory was at its flow within her
brain; and because the Past _is_ Past it touches us. This man had loved
her once, after his own scornful manner, when he was young, and before
power and selfishness had made him stone. He had been the father of her
only son, and now he was Dead.

"I am so sorry," said Harry, not quite knowing what to say.

"There is no need for sorrow," replied the other, quietly. "Let us go up
stairs and finish our work."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

WITCHERY.

Carew of Crompton was really dead, as men said, "at last," not that he
had been long dying, or was an old man, but that he had eventually
succumbed to one of those deadly risks to which he had so often
voluntarily exposed himself. On the occasion which had been fatal to him
he had started from home one frosty morning at the gallop, with a cigar
in his mouth, the reins on his horse's neck, and both his hands in his
pockets, and had been pitched off and broken his neck within half a mile
of his own door. His chaplain, who had dispatched the news to Mrs.
Basil, had been riding by his side at the very moment. "He was a good
friend to me," was the laconic remark that poor Parson Whymper had added
to the bare intelligence.

To judge by the regretful excitement in the Midlands, Carew might have
been a good friend to every body. The news was at once telegraphed to
town, and appeared in the evening papers. The public interest in his mad
freaks had of late years grown somewhat faint--his extravagances were,
perforce, on a less splendid scale--but his death revived it. "So that
mad Carew has killed himself, after all," was the observation frequently
overheard that evening, as acquaintance met acquaintance on their
homeward way from business. "Well, he's had his whack of most things,"
was the reply of the philosophers; "He has not left much to tempt his
heirs to be extravagant, I reckon," of the cynics; "He was a deuced good
fellow at bottom, I believe," remarked those who were secretly desirous
of earning the same eulogium for themselves; "He was altogether wrong at
top," answered the charitable.

Solomon Coe came home to his new abode in such a state of elation that
it even made him communicative to his wife. Mrs. Basil