fore, as I knew, Corvick had reached London, the announcement of
the sudden death of poor Mrs. Erme. I instantly wrote to Gwendolen
for particulars, and she replied that her mother had succumbed to
long-threatened failure of the heart. She didn't say, but I took the
liberty of reading into her words, that from the point of view of her
marriage and also of her eagerness, which was quite a match for mine,
this was a solution more prompt than could have been expected and more
radical than waiting for the old lady to swallow the dose. I candidly
admit indeed that at the time--for I heard from her repeatedly--I
read some singular things into Gwendolen's words and some still more
extraordinary ones into her silences. Pen in hand, this way, I live the
time over, and it brings back the oddest sense of my having been for
months and in spite of myself a kind of coerced spectator. All my life
had taken refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to
have committed itself to keep astare. There were days when I thought of
writing to Hugh Vereker and simply throwing myself on his charity. But I
felt more deeply that I hadn't fallen quite so low, besides which, quite
properly, he would send me about my business. Mrs. Erme's death
brought Corvick straight home, and within the month he was united "very
quietly"--as quietly I suppose as he meant in his article to bring out
his _trouvaille_--to the young lady he had loved and quitted. I use this
last term, I may parenthetically say, because I subsequently grew sure
that at the time he went to India, at the time of his great news from
Bombay, there was no engagement whatever. There was none at the moment
she affirmed the opposite. On the other hand he certainly became engaged
the day he returned. The happy pair went down to Torquay for their
honeymoon, and there, in a reckless hour, it occurred to poor Corvick to
take his young bride a drive. He had no command of that business: this
had been brought home to me of old in a little tour we had once made
together in a dogcart. In a dogcart he perched his companion for a
rattle over Devonshire hills, on one of the likeliest of which he
brought his horse, who, it was true, had bolted, down with such violence
that the occupants of the cart were hurled forward and that he fell
horribly on his head. He was killed on the spot; Gwendolen escaped
unhurt.

I pass rapidly over the question of this unmitigated tragedy, of what
the loss of m