She lay in her friend's arms; she looked up in her friend's face; she
went back wildly to her fear for her child.

"Don't bring her up like Me! She must be a governess--she must get her
bread. Don't let her act! don't let her sing! don't let her go on the
stage!" She stopped--her voice suddenly recovered its sweetness of
tone--she smiled faintly--she said the old girlish words once more,
in the old girlish way, "Vow it, Blanche!" Lady Lundie kissed her, and
answered, as she had answered when they parted in the ship, "I vow it,
Anne!"

The head sank, never to be lifted more. The last look of life flickered
in the filmy eyes and went out. For a moment afterward her lips moved.
Lady Lundie put her ear close to them, and heard the dreadful question
reiterated, in the same dreadful words: "She is Anne Silvester--as I
was. _Will she end like Me?_"

VI.

Five years passed--and the lives of the three men who had sat at the
dinner-table in the Hampstead villa began, in their altered aspects, to
reveal the progress of time and change.

Mr. Kendrew; Mr. Delamayn; Mr. Vanborough. Let the order in which they
are here named be the order in which their lives are reviewed, as seen
once more after a lapse of five years.

How the husband's friend marked his sense of the husband's treachery has
been told already. How he felt the death of the deserted wife is still
left to tell. Report, which sees the inmost hearts of men, and delights
in turning them outward to the public view, had always declared that
Mr. Kendrew's life had its secret, and that the secret was a hopeless
passion for the beautiful woman who had married his friend. Not a hint
ever dropped to any living soul, not a word ever spoken to the woman
herself, could be produced in proof of the assertion while the woman
lived. When she died Report started up again more confidently than ever,
and appealed to the man's own conduct as proof against the man himself.

He attended the funeral--though he was no relation. He took a few
blades of grass from the turf with which they covered her grave--when he
thought that nobody was looking at him. He disappeared from his club.
He traveled. He came back. He admitted that he was weary of England.
He applied for, and obtained, an appointment in one of the colonies.
To what conclusion did all this point? Was it not plain that his usual
course of life had lost its attraction for him, when the object of his
infatuation had ceased to exis