her. She belonged to that high order of human beings who
require a sure approval of conscience even for their physical
health, and whose house of life, wanting this fine cement, easily
falls to dissolution. Did she, then, doubt her husband? Did she
believe Matilda's accusations to be true? Karen asked herself
these questions very often, and always answered them with strong
assurances of Liot's innocence; but nevertheless they became part
of her existence. No mental decisions, nor even actual words,
could drive them from the citadel they had entered. Though she
never mentioned the subject to Liot, though she watched herself
continually lest any such doubts should darken her smiles or chill
her love, yet they insensibly impregnated the house in which they
dwelt with her. Liot could not say he felt them here or there, but
they were all-pervading.

Karen withered in their presence, and Liot's denser soul would
eventually have become sick with the same influence. It was,
therefore, no calamity that spared their love such a tragic trial,
and if Liot had been a man of clearer perceptions he would have
understood that it was not in anger, but in mercy to both of them,
that Karen had been removed to paradise. Her last words, however,
had partially opened his spiritual vision. He saw what poison had
defiled the springs of her life, and he knew instinctively that
Matilda Sabiston was the enemy that had done the deed.

It was, therefore, little wonder that he sent her no notice of
her niece's death. And, indeed, Matilda heard of it first through
the bellman calling the funeral hour through the town. The day was
of the stormiest, and many remembered how steadily storm and gust
had attended all the great events of Karen's short life. She had
been born in the tempest which sent her father to the bottom of the
sea, and she herself, in coming from Yell to Lerwick, had barely
escaped shipwreck. Her bridal garments had been drenched with rain,
and on the day set for her baby's christening there was one of the
worst of snow-storms. Indeed, many said that it was the wetting she
received on that occasion which had developed the "wasting" that
killed her. The same turmoil of the elements marked her burial
day. A cold northeast wind drove through the wet streets, and the
dreary monotony of the outside world was unspeakable.

But Matilda Sabiston looked through her dim windows without any
sense of the weather's depressing influence--the st