on the speaker; and then, with a passionate vehemence
that told of a frantic brain, he tore the paper into fragments, and,
with a wild yell, as if of triumph, he fell senseless on the ground.
When they lifted him up, his features were calm, but passionless, his
eye was vacant, and his lips slightly parted. An expression of weariness
and exhaustion, rather than of actual pain, pervaded the face. He never
spoke again. The lamp of intellect was extinguished forever, and not
even a flicker or a spark remained to cheer the darkness within him.
Hopeless and helpless idiotcy was ever after the lot of one whose mind,
once stored with the most lofty ambitions, never scrupled, at any cost,
to attain its object. And he whose proud aspirings soared to the very
grandest of earthly prizes, who gave his counsel among princes, now
lives on, bereft of mind and intelligence, without consciousness of the
past, or a hope for the future.

CHAPTER XLI. THE END

With the sad episode which closes our last chapter we would fain let
fall the curtain on this history. Very few words will now suffice to
complete the narrative of those with whom we have so long sojourned. The
discovery which revealed the murder of Mr. Godfrey restored Frank Dalton
to the home and fortune of his family; and although the trying scenes
through which he had passed made deep and dangerous inroads on his
health, youth and hope, and the watchful care of Kate, restored him;
and, after the lapse of some weeks, he was enabled to be about once
more, recalling to the recollection of many the handsome figure and
manly bearing of his father.

For many a year before, Corrig-O'Neal had not seen such a party beneath
its roof, nor had those gloomy old walls echoed to such sounds as now
were heard within them. In addition to Lady Hester, George Onslow, now
a colonel, was the guest of the Daltons. Scarcely arrived in England,
he quitted London at the moment when the tidings of his gallant
achievements had made him the hero of the day, and hurried to see _her_
who, through every change of his fortunes, had been the dearest object
of his heart.

What tender reproaches, what heart-warm confessions, did those old woods
hear, as, side by side, the lovers walked along, revealing the secret
sorrows of the past, and recalling each incident which once had cheered
with hope or shadowed with despair. But it is not in such company we
would play the "eavesdropper," nor watch for the chan