llected amounted to nearly fifteen hundred pounds, and
late one evening he started for Kensington with a bundle of papers
under his arm and a cheque-book in his pocket.

It was his last visit,--at any rate, for the present,--he told himself
with a sense of wonderful relief, as he walked through the Park in the
gathering twilight. For of late, something in connection with his
day's efforts had taken him every evening to the shabby little house
at Kensington, where his coming was eagerly welcomed by the tired,
sick man and the lonely boy. He had esteemed himself a man well
schooled in all manner of self-control, and little to be influenced in
a matter of duty by his personal likes and dislikes. But these visits
were a torture to him! To sit and talk for hours with a man, grateful
enough, but peevish and commonplace, and with a curious lack of
virility or self-reliance in his untoward circumstances, was trial
enough to Matravers, who had been used to select his associates and
associations with delicate and close care. But to remember that this
man had been, and indeed was, the husband of Berenice, was madness! It
was this man, whom at the best he could only regard with a kindly and
gentle contempt, who stood between him and such surprising happiness,
this man and the boy with his pale, serious face and dark eyes. And
the bitterness of fate--for he never realized that it would have been
possible for him to have acted otherwise--had made him their
benefactor!

Just as he was leaving the Park he glanced up at the sound of a
carriage passing him rapidly, and as he looked up he stood still!
It seemed to him that life itself was standing still in his veins.
Berenice had been silent. There had come no word from her! But nothing
so tragic, so horrible as this, had ever occurred to him! His heart
had been full of black despair, and his days had been days of misery;
but even the possibility of seeking for himself solace, by means not
altogether worthy, had never dawned upon him. Nor had he dreamed it of
her! Yet the man who waved his hand from the box-seat of the phaeton
with a courtesy seemingly real, but, under the circumstances, brutally
ironical, was Thorndyke, and the woman who sat by his side was
Berenice!

The carriage passed on down the broad drive, and Matravers stood
looking after it. Was it his fancy, or was that, indeed, a faint cry
which came travelling through the dim light to his ears as he stood
there under the t