t, indubitable duties for which
Fleeming lived, and he could not pardon even the suggestion of neglect.

And now, after death had so long visibly but still innocuously hovered
above the family, it began at last to strike, and its blows fell thick
and heavy. The first to go was uncle John Jenkin, taken at last from his
Mexican dwelling and the lost tribes of Israel; and nothing in this
remarkable old gentleman's life became him like the leaving of it. His
sterling, jovial acquiescence in man's destiny was a delight to
Fleeming. "My visit to Stowting has been a very strange but not at all a
painful one," he wrote. "In case you ever wish to make a person die as
he ought to die in a novel," he said to me, "I must tell you all about
my old uncle." He was to see a nearer instance before long; for this
family of Jenkin, if they were not very aptly fitted to live, had the
art of manly dying. Uncle John was but an outsider after all; he had
dropped out of hail of his nephew's way of life and station in society,
and was more like some shrewd, old, humble friend who should have kept a
lodge; yet he led the procession of becoming deaths, and began in the
mind of Fleeming that train of tender and grateful thought which was
like a preparation for his own. Already I find him writing in the plural
of "these impending deaths"; already I find him in quest of consolation.
"There is little pain in store for these wayfarers," he wrote, "and we
have hope--more than hope, trust."

On May 19, 1884, Mr. Austin was taken. He was seventy-eight years of
age, suffered sharply with all his old firmness, and died happy in the
knowledge that he had left his wife well cared for. This had always been
a bosom concern; for the Barrons were long-lived and he believed that
she would long survive him. But their union had been so full and quiet
that Mrs. Austin languished under the separation. In their last years
they would sit all evening in their own drawing-room hand in hand: two
old people who, for all their fundamental differences, had yet grown
together and become all the world in each other's eyes and hearts; and
it was felt to be a kind release when, eight months after, on January
14, 1885, Eliza Barron followed Alfred Austin. "I wish I could save you
from all pain," wrote Fleeming six days later to his sorrowing wife, "I
would if I could--but my way is not God's way; and of this be
assured,--God's way is best."

In the end of the same month Captain