us it happened that she did not hear when someone knocked
lightly at the door and entered. A shadow across the still features
told her of another's presence. Starting back, she saw a lady from whose
pale, beautiful face a veil had just been raised. The stranger, who was
regarding her with tenderly compassionate eyes, said:

'I am Mrs. Mutimer.'

Emma rose to her feet and drew a little apart. Her face fell.

'They told me downstairs,' Adela pursued, 'that I should find Miss Vine
in the room. Is your name Emma Vine?'

Emma asked herself whether this lady, his wife, could know anything
of her story. It seemed so, from the tone of the question. She only
replied:

'Yes, it is.'

Then she again ventured to look up at the woman whose beauty had made
her life barren. There were no signs of tears on Adela's face; to Emma
she seemed cold, though so grave and gentle. Adela gazed for a while
at the dead man. She, too, felt as though it were all a dream. The
spectacle of Emma's passionate grief had kept her emotion within her
heart, perhaps had weakened it.

'You have yourself been hurt,' she said, turning again to the other.

Emma only shook her head. She suffered terribly from Adela's presence.

'I will go,' she said in a whisper.

'This is your room, I think?'

'Yes.'

'May I stay here?'

'Of course--you must.'

Emma was moving towards the door.

'You wish to go?' Adela said, uttering the words involuntarily.

'Yes, I must.'

Adela, left alone, stood gazing at the dead face. She did not kneel by
her husband, as Emma had done, but a terrible anguish came upon her as
she gazed; she buried her face in her hands. Her feeling was more of
horror at the crime that had been committed than of individual grief.
Yet grief she knew. The last words her husband had spoken to her were
good and worthy; in her memory they overcame all else. That parting when
he left home had seemed to her like the beginning of a new life for him.
Could not his faults be atoned for otherwise than by this ghastly end?
She had no need to direct her thoughts to the good that was in him. Even
as she had taken his part against his traducers, so she now was
stirred in spirit against his murderers. She felt a solemn gladness in
remembering that she had stood before that meeting in the Clerkenwell
room and served him as far as it was in a woman's power to do. All
her long sufferings were forgotten; this supreme calamity of death
outweighed them all.