had been her first devoir on reaching
England. She had nursed him tenderly through his last illness, as
she had been in all respects an exemplary wife. Yet, standing
beneath his monument, she felt herself an impostor. She could find
here no true memories of the man whose look had swayed her soul,
whose love she had served with rites a woman never forgets.
This city of Bath did not hold the true dust of her lord and love.
He had perished--though sinning against her, what mattered it?--years
ago, under a fallen pillar in a street of Lisbon. Doubtless the site
had been built over; it would be hard to find now, so actively had
the Marquis de Pombal, Portugal's First Minister, renovated the
ruined city. But whether discoverable or not, there and not here was
written the last of Oliver Vyell.

Somehow in her thoughts of him on the other side of the Atlantic,
in her demesne of Eagles where they had walked together as lovers,
she had not separated her memories of him so sharply. Now, suddenly,
with a sense of having been cheated, she saw Oliver Vyell as two
separate men. The one had possessed her; she had merely married the
other.

With the blank sense of having been cheated mingled a sense that she
herself was the cheat. The tablet accused her of it, confronting her
with words which, all too sharply, she remembered as of her own
composing. "_After a tedious and painful Illness, sustained with the
Patience and resignation becoming to a Christian_." Why to a
Christian more than to another? Was it not mere manliness to bear
(as, to do him justice, he had borne) ill-health with fortitude, and
face dissolution with courage? How had she ever come to utter coin
that rang with so false and cheap a note? She felt shame of it.
The taint of its falsehood seemed to blend and become one with a
general odour of humbug, sickly, infectious, insinuating itself,
stealing along the darkened Gothic aisles. Since nothing is surer
than death, nothing can be corrupter than mortality deceiving itself.
. . . The west door of the Abbey stood open. Ruth, striving to
collect her thoughts, saw the sunlight beyond it spread broad upon
the city's famous piazza. Sounds, too, were wafted in through the
doorway, penetrating the hush, distracting her; rumble of workday
traffic, voices of vendors in distant streets; among these--asserting
itself quietly, yet steadily, regularly as a beat in music--a
footfall on the pavement outside. . . . She