rvant in search of him.

'I have been trying for some time to find you, sir,' he said. 'This
letter has come by the post, and it is marked immediate. And there's
this one from Mr. Downe, who called just now wanting to see you.' He
searched his pocket for the second.

Barnet took the first letter--it had a black border, and bore the London
postmark. It was not in his wife's handwriting, or in that of any person
he knew; but conjecture soon ceased as he read the page, wherein he was
briefly informed that Mrs. Barnet had died suddenly on the previous day,
at the furnished villa she had occupied near London.

Barnet looked vaguely round the empty hall, at the blank walls, out of
the doorway. Drawing a long palpitating breath, and with eyes downcast,
he turned and climbed the stairs slowly, like a man who doubted their
stability. The fact of his wife having, as it were, died once already,
and lived on again, had entirely dislodged the possibility of her actual
death from his conjecture. He went to the landing, leant over the
balusters, and after a reverie, of whose duration he had but the faintest
notion, turned to the window and stretched his gaze to the cottage
further down the road, which was visible from his landing, and from which
Lucy still walked to the solicitor's house by a cross path. The faint
words that came from his moving lips were simply, 'At last!'

Then, almost involuntarily, Barnet fell down on his knees and murmured
some incoherent words of thanksgiving. Surely his virtue in restoring
his wife to life had been rewarded! But, as if the impulse struck
uneasily on his conscience, he quickly rose, brushed the dust from his
trousers and set himself to think of his next movements. He could not
start for London for some hours; and as he had no preparations to make
that could not be made in half-an-hour, he mechanically descended and
resumed his occupation of turning over the wall-papers. They had all got
brighter for him, those papers. It was all changed--who would sit in the
rooms that they were to line? He went on to muse upon Lucy's conduct in
so frequently coming to the house with the children; her occasional blush
in speaking to him; her evident interest in him. What woman can in the
long run avoid being interested in a man whom she knows to be devoted to
her? If human solicitation could ever effect anything, there should be
no going to India for Lucy now. All the papers previously chosen