ithout
mitres. No priests, Dick. It is you I want. I have left you eight
thousand pounds--all I could save, Dick. Everything goes back to William
now; but the eight thousand pounds is yours. Arabella is witness to it.
Dick, Dick, you will think of me sometimes?"

And Hyde kissed her fondly. Ugly, heartless, sinful, she might be to
others; but to him she had been a double mother. "I'll never forget
you," he answered; "never, grandmother."

"I know what the town will say: 'Well, well, old Lady Capel has gone to
her deserts at last.' Don't mind them, Dick. Let them talk. They will
have to go too; it's the old round--meat and mirth, and then to
bed--a--long--sleep."

"Grandmother?"

"I hear you, Dick. Good-night."

"Is there anything you want done? Think, dear grandmother."

"Don't let Exmouth come to my funeral. I don't want him--grinning
over--my coffin."

"Any other thing?"

"Put me beside Jack Capel. I wonder--if I shall--see Jack." A shadow,
gray and swift, passed over her face. Her eyes flashed one piteous look
into Hyde's eyes, and then closed forever.

And while in the rainy, dreary London twilight Lady Capel was dying,
Katherine was in the garden at Hyde Manor, watching the planting of
seeds that were in a few weeks to be living things of beauty and
sweetness. It had ceased raining at noon in Norfolk, and the gravel
walks were perfectly dry, and the air full of the fragrance of
innumerable violets. All the level land was wearing buttercups. Full of
secrets, of fluttering wings, and building nests were the trees. In the
apple-blooms the bees were humming, delirious with delight. From the
beehives came the peculiar and exquisite odour of virgin wax. Somewhere
near, also, the gurgle of running water spread an air of freshness all
around.

[Illustration: She was stretched upon a sofa]

And Katherine, with a little basket full of flower-seeds, was going with
the gardener from bed to bed, watching him plant them. No one who had
seen her in the childlike loveliness of her early girlhood could have
imagined the splendour of her matured beauty. She had grown "divinely
tall," and the exercise of undisputed authority had added a gracious
stateliness of manner. Her complexion was wonderful, her large blue eyes
shining with tender lights, her face full of sympathetic revelations.
Above all, she had that nameless charm which comes from a freedom from
all anxious thought for the morrow; that charm of which the swee