f that.'

'Ell, you are not thinking still about that--poetical friend of yours?'

She neither admitted nor denied the charge. 'I am not going to get over
my illness this time,' she reiterated. 'Something tells me I shan't.'

This view of things was rather a bad beginning, as it usually is; and, in
fact, six weeks later, in the month of May, she was lying in her room,
pulseless and bloodless, with hardly strength enough left to follow up
one feeble breath with another, the infant for whose unnecessary life she
was slowly parting with her own being fat and well. Just before her
death she spoke to Marchmill softly:-

'Will, I want to confess to you the entire circumstances of that--about
you know what--that time we visited Solentsea. I can't tell what
possessed me--how I could forget you so, my husband! But I had got into
a morbid state: I thought you had been unkind; that you had neglected me;
that you weren't up to my intellectual level, while he was, and far above
it. I wanted a fuller appreciator, perhaps, rather than another lover--'

She could get no further then for very exhaustion; and she went off in
sudden collapse a few hours later, without having said anything more to
her husband on the subject of her love for the poet. William Marchmill,
in truth, like most husbands of several years' standing, was little
disturbed by retrospective jealousies, and had not shown the least
anxiety to press her for confessions concerning a man dead and gone
beyond any power of inconveniencing him more.

But when she had been buried a couple of years it chanced one day that,
in turning over some forgotten papers that he wished to destroy before
his second wife entered the house, he lighted on a lock of hair in an
envelope, with the photograph of the deceased poet, a date being written
on the back in his late wife's hand. It was that of the time they spent
at Solentsea.

Marchmill looked long and musingly at the hair and portrait, for
something struck him. Fetching the little boy who had been the death of
his mother, now a noisy toddler, he took him on his knee, held the lock
of hair against the child's head, and set up the photograph on the table
behind, so that he could closely compare the features each countenance
presented. There were undoubtedly strong traces of resemblance; the
dreamy and peculiar expression of the poet's face sat, as the transmitted
idea, upon the child's, and the hair was of the same hue.