carelessness drove me mad--I tried to revenge myself on
him by making you suffer. But you would not believe me, and you
were right. Pity me if you can, and pray for me.

"ROSALIND ROMAINE."

"Ah, poor soul!" thought Alice Brooke, her eyes filling with tears. "I
do pity her--I do, with all my heart. God help her!"

And she said those words again--useless as they might be--when, by and
by, a messenger came hurrying to the house with the news that Mrs.
Romaine had been found dead that morning--dead, from an overdose of the
chloral which she kept beside her for sleeplessness. And so the life of
false aims and perverted longings came to its appointed end.

* * * * *

There was never a cloud on Alice Brooke's domestic happiness, never a
shadow of distrust between her and her husband, after this. For some
little time they changed their mode of life--giving up the house in
Bloomsbury and spending long, blissful months in Italy and the Tyrol. It
was like another honeymoon. And when they returned to London, Caspar
took a house in a sunnier and pleasanter region than Upper Woburn Place,
but not so far away as to prevent him from visiting the Macclesfield
Club on Sundays, and having a chat with Jim Gregson and his other
workman friends. These workmen and their wives came also in their turn
to Mr. Brooke's abode, where there was not only a gentle and gracious
lady to preside at the table (where twelve especially valued silver
spoons always held a place of honor), but a very remarkable baby in the
nursery; and it was Mr. Brooke's continual regret that he had not
insisted on naming his son and heir Macclesfield, after the workmen's
buildings, instead of the more commonplace Maurice, after Maurice
Kenyon. But Maurice and Lesley returned the compliment by calling their
eldest child Caspar, although Lesley did say saucily that she thought it
a very ugly name.

Francis Trent was in a lunatic asylum, "at Her Majesty's pleasure." His
wife was allowed to see him now and then; and on this account she would
not leave England, as some of her friends urged her to do, but occupied
herself with needlework and some kind of district visiting among the
poor. The Brookes and the Kenyons were both exceedingly kind to her, and
would have been kinder if she had felt it possible to accept "their
kindness"; but, although she cherished in secret a strong affection for
Lesley, she was too much ashamed of h