was fairly under way, Havill
began to feel himself in a trying position. It was not that he had
bestowed much affection upon his deceased wife, irreproachable woman as
she had been; but the suddenness of her death had shaken his nerves,
and Mr. Woodwell's address on the uncertainty of life involved
considerations of conduct on earth that bore with singular directness
upon Havill's unprincipled manoeuvre for victory in the castle
competition. He wished he had not been so inadvertent as to take his
customary chair in the chapel. People who saw Havill's agitation did not
know that it was most largely owing to his sense of the fraud which had
been practised on the unoffending Somerset; and when, unable longer to
endure the torture of Woodwell's words, he rose from his place and went
into the chapel vestry, the preacher little thought that remorse for
a contemptibly unfair act, rather than grief for a dead wife, was the
cause of the architect's withdrawal.

When Havill got into the open air his morbid excitement calmed down, but
a sickening self-abhorrence for the proceeding instigated by Dare did
not abate. To appropriate another man's design was no more nor less than
to embezzle his money or steal his goods. The intense reaction from
his conduct of the past two or three months did not leave him when
he reached his own house and observed where the handbills of the
countermanded sale had been torn down, as the result of the payment made
in advance by Paula of money which should really have been Somerset's.

The mood went on intensifying when he was in bed. He lay awake till the
clock reached those still, small, ghastly hours when the vital fires
burn at their lowest in the human frame, and death seizes more of his
victims than in any other of the twenty-four. Havill could bear it no
longer; he got a light, went down into his office and wrote the note
subjoined.

'MADAM,--The recent death of my wife necessitates a considerable change
in my professional arrangements and plans with regard to the future.
One of the chief results of the change is, I regret to state, that I
no longer find myself in a position to carry out the enlargement of the
castle which you had so generously entrusted to my hands.

'I beg leave therefore to resign all further connection with the same,
and to express, if you will allow me, a hope that the commission may
be placed in the hands of the other competitor. Herewith is returned a
cheque for one-h