he did his work of love in the background. He was the god
in the machine; no more. No single opportunity of thanking him did he
afford her. He effaced himself that she might not see the sorrow she
occasioned him, lest it should increase her own.

For two years she dwelt at Maligny in such peace as the broken-hearted
may know, the little of life that was left her irradiated by Everard's
noble friendship. He wrote to her from time to time, now from Italy, now
from Holland. But he never came to visit her. A delicacy, which may
or may not have been false, restrained him. And she, respecting what
instinctively she knew to be his feelings, never bade him come to her.
In their letters they never spoke of Rotherby; not once did his name
pass between them; it was as if he had never lived or never crossed
their lives. Meanwhile she weakened and faded day by day, despite all
the care with which she was surrounded. That winter of cold and want in
the Cour des Miracles had sown its seeds, and Death was sharpening his
scythe against the harvest.

When the end was come she sent urgently for Everard. He came at once in
answer to her summons; but he came too late. She died the evening before
he arrived. But she had left a letter, written days before, against the
chance of his not reaching her before the end. That letter, in her fine
French hand, was before him now.

"I will not try to thank you, dearest friend," she wrote. "For the thing
that you have done, what payment is there in poor thanks? Oh, Everard,
Everard! Had it but pleased God to have helped me to a wiser choice
when it was mine to choose!" she cried to him from that letter, and
poor Everard deemed that the thin ray of joy her words sent through his
anguished soul was payment more than enough for the little that he had
done. "God's will be done!" she continued. "It is His will. He knows why
it is best so, though we discern it not. But there is the boy; there
is Justin. I bequeath him to you who already have done so much for him.
Love him a little for my sake; cherish and rear him as your own, and
make of him such a gentleman as are you. His father does not so much as
know of his existence. That, too, is best so, for I would not have him
claim my boy. Never let him learn that Justin exists, unless it be to
punish him by the knowledge for his cruel desertion of me."

Choking, the writing blurred by tears that he accounted no disgrace to
his young manhood, Everard had sworn