l she could say.

"Yes; I will spare you, poor wretch, for your husband's sake--because she
loved him--and his burden, God help him! is heavy enough as it is. Go!"
flinging her arm rudely from him. "Go, whilst you have got time, lest the
thirst for your blood be too strong for me."

And this time no one saw her go. Like a hunted animal, she fled away
among the trees, her gleaming many-hued dress trailing all wet and
drabbled on the sodden earth behind her, and the darkness of the
gathering night closed in around her, and covered her in mercy with
its pitiful mantle.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

AT PEACE.

Open, dark grave, and take her:
Though we have loved her so,
Yet we must now forsake her:
Love will no more awake her:
Oh bitter woe!
Open thine arms and take her
To rest below!

A. Procter.

So Vera was at peace at last. The troubled life was over; the vexed
question of her fate was settled for her. There was to be no more
struggling of right against wrong, of expediency against truth, for her
for evermore. She had all--nay, more than all she wanted now.

"It was what she desired herself," said the vicar, brokenly, as he knelt
by the side of her who had been so dear and precious to him. "Only a
Sunday or two ago she said to me 'If I could die, I should be at peace.'"

And Maurice, with hidden face at the foot of the bed, could not answer
him for tears.

It was there, by that white still presence, that lay so calm and so
lovely amongst the showers of heavy-scented waxen flowers, wherewith
loving hands had decked her for her last long sleep; it was there that
Eustace learnt at last the secret of her life, and the fatal love that
had so wrecked her happiness. It was all clear to him now. Her struggles,
her temptations, her pitiful moments of weakness and misery, her
courageous strife against the hopelessness of her fate--all was made
plain now: he understood her at last.

In Maurice Kynaston's passion of despairing grief he read the story of
her sad life's trouble.

Truly, Maurice had enough to bear; for he alone, and one other, who spoke
no word of it to him, knew the terrible secret of her death; to all else
it was "an accident;" to him and to Denis Wilde alone it was "murder." To
him, too, the motive of the foul, cowardly deed had been revealed; for,
tightly clasped in that poor dead hand, true to the last to the trust
that had been given her, was the fatal packet of letters