ow the happy wife of that good little
clergyman, Sprigge Biddlepen. It has been in my power to be of use to them,
and he shall have the next presentation to Dawling.

Meg Hawkes, proud and wayward, and the most affectionate creature on earth,
was married to Tom Brice a few months after these events; and, as both
wished to emigrate, I furnished them with the capital, and I am told they
are likely to be rich. I hear from my kind Meg often, and she seems very
happy.

My dear old friends, Mary Quince and Mrs. Rusk, are, alas! growing old, but
living with me, and very happy. And after long solicitation, I persuaded
Doctor Bryerly, the best and truest of ministers, with my dearest friend's
concurrence, to undertake the management of the Derbyshire estates. In this
I have been most fortunate. He is the very person for such a charge--so
punctual, so laborious, so kind, and so shrewd.

In compliance with medical advice, cousin Monica hurried me away to the
Continent, where she would never permit me to allude to the terrific scenes
which remain branded so awfully on my brain. It needed no constraint. It is
a sort of agony to me even now to think of them.

The plan was craftily devised. Neither old Wyat nor Giles, the butler, had
a suspicion that I had returned to Bartram. Had I been put to death, the
secret of my fate would have been deposited in the keeping of four persons
only--the two Ruthyns, Hawkes, and ultimately Madame. My dear cousin Monica
had been artfully led to believe in my departure for France, and prepared
for my silence. Suspicion might not have been excited for a year after my
death, and then would never, in all probability, have pointed to Bartram as
the scene of the crime. The weeds would have grown over me, and I should
have lain in that deep grave where the corpse of Madame de la Rougierre was
unearthed in the darksome quadrangle of Bartram-Haugh.

It was more than two years after that I heard what had befallen at Bartram
after my flight. Old Wyat, who went early to Uncle Silas's room, to her
surprise--for he had told her that he was that night to accompany his son,
who had to meet the mailtrain to Derby at five o'clock in the morning--saw
her old master lying on the sofa, much in his usual position.

'There was nout much strange about him,' old Wyat said, 'but that his
scent-bottle was spilt on its side over on the table, and he dead.'

She thought he was not quite cold when she found him, and she sent