er this--left her sitting before the
table, with her restless hands turning over the papers.

The servant who went in search of her at seven o'clock that evening,
when dinner was served, found her sitting there still, with a sealed
letter lying on the table before her; but her head had fallen across
the cushioned arm of the chair--she had been dead some hours.

There was a post-mortem examination and an inquest. Mrs. Darrell had
taken poison. The jury brought in a verdict of suicide while in a
state of unsound mind. The act seemed too causeless for sanity. Her
strange absent ways had attracted the attention of the servants for
some time past, and the evidence of her own maid respecting her
restlessness and irritability for the last few months influenced the
minds of coroner and jury.

The letter found lying on the table before her was addressed to
Angus Egerton. He declined to communicate its contents when
questioned about it at the inquest. Milly progressed towards
recovery slowly but surely from the hour in which I stopped the
suspected medicine. The time came when we were obliged to tell her
of her stepmother's awful death; but she never knew the attempt that
had been made on her own life, or the atmosphere of hatred in which
she had lived.

We left Thornleigh for Scarborough as soon as she was well enough to
be moved, and only returned in the early spring, in time for my
darling's wedding.

She has now been married nearly seven years, during which time her
life has been very bright and happy--a life of almost uncheckered
sunshine. She has carried out her idea of our friendship to the very
letter; and we have never been separated, except during her
honeymoon and my own visits home. Happily for my sense of
independence, there are now plenty of duties for me to perform at
Cumber Priory, where I am governess to a brood of pretty children,
who call me auntie, and hold me scarcely second to their mother in
their warm young hearts. Angus Egerton is a model country squire and
master of the hounds; and he and his wife enjoy an unbroken
popularity among rich and poor. Peter is under-gardener at the
Priory, and no longer lives with his grandmother, who left her
cottage soon after Mrs. Darrell's suicide, and is supposed to have
gone to London.

End of Project Gutenberg's Milly Darrell and Other Tales, by M. E. Braddon

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