Countess of Wessex, as he had foretold.

The little white frock in which she had been married to him at the tender
age of twelve was carefully preserved among the relics at King's-Hintock
Court, where it may still be seen by the curious--a yellowing, pathetic
testimony to the small count taken of the happiness of an innocent child
in the social strategy of those days, which might have led, but
providentially did not lead, to great unhappiness.

When the Earl died Betty wrote him an epitaph, in which she described him
as the best of husbands, fathers, and friends, and called herself his
disconsolate widow.

Such is woman; or rather (not to give offence by so sweeping an
assertion), such was Betty Dornell.

* * * * *

It was at a meeting of one of the Wessex Field and Antiquarian Clubs that
the foregoing story, partly told, partly read from a manuscript, was made
to do duty for the regulation papers on deformed butterflies, fossil ox-
horns, prehistoric dung-mixens, and such like, that usually occupied the
more serious attention of the members.

This Club was of an inclusive and intersocial character; to a degree,
indeed, remarkable for the part of England in which it had its
being--dear, delightful Wessex, whose statuesque dynasties are even now
only just beginning to feel the shaking of the new and strange spirit
without, like that which entered the lonely valley of Ezekiel's vision
and made the dry bones move: where the honest squires, tradesmen,
parsons, clerks, and people still praise the Lord with one voice for His
best of all possible worlds.

The present meeting, which was to extend over two days, had opened its
proceedings at the museum of the town whose buildings and environs were
to be visited by the members. Lunch had ended, and the afternoon
excursion had been about to be undertaken, when the rain came down in an
obstinate spatter, which revealed no sign of cessation. As the members
waited they grew chilly, although it was only autumn, and a fire was
lighted, which threw a cheerful shine upon the varnished skulls, urns,
penates, tesserae, costumes, coats of mail, weapons, and missals,
animated the fossilized ichthyosaurus and iguanodon; while the dead eyes
of the stuffed birds--those never-absent familiars in such collections,
though murdered to extinction out of doors--flashed as they had flashed
to the rising sun above the neighbouring moors on the fatal morning when
the trigger was pulled which e