soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed
quietly away.

Then Fitzpiers broke the silence. "Have you lived here long?" said he.

Grace was wild with sorrow--with all that had befallen her--with the
cruelties that had attacked her--with life--with Heaven. She answered
at random. "Yes. By what right do you ask?"

"Don't think I claim any right," said Fitzpiers, sadly. "It is for you
to do and say what you choose. I admit, quite as much as you feel,
that I am a vagabond--a brute--not worthy to possess the smallest
fragment of you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficient
interest in you to make that inquiry."

"He is everything to me!" said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, and
laying her hand reverently on the dead man's eyelids, where she kept it
a long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if she
were stroking a little bird.

He watched her a while, and then glanced round the chamber where his
eyes fell upon a few dressing necessaries that she had brought.

"Grace--if I may call you so," he said, "I have been already humiliated
almost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join me
elsewhere--I have entered your father's house, and borne all that that
cost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deserved
humiliation. But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me?
You say you have been living here--that he is everything to you. Am I
to draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?"

Triumph at any price is sweet to men and women--especially the latter.
It was her first and last opportunity of repaying him for the cruel
contumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.

"Yes," she answered; and there was that in her subtly compounded nature
which made her feel a thrill of pride as she did so.

Yet the moment after she had so mightily belied her character she half
repented. Her husband had turned as white as the wall behind him. It
seemed as if all that remained to him of life and spirit had been
abstracted at a stroke. Yet he did not move, and in his efforts at
self-control closed his mouth together as a vice. His determination
was fairly successful, though she saw how very much greater than she
had expected her triumph had been. Presently he looked across at
Winterborne.

"Would it startle you to hear," he said, as if he hardly had breath to
utter the words, "that she who was to me what he was to you is