offer money if necessary to defray its
expenses, to let no "respect" be spared. She would have liked "respect"
in this way. It would have given her pleasure to think that she was to
have a fine funeral. Dick gave his man the fullest instructions. "She
was connected with--friends of mine," Dick said, "who would wish
everything to be respectably done, though they cannot themselves take
any part." "I understand, sir," said the man, who put the most natural
interpretation upon the strange commission, and did not believe in any
fiction about Dick's "friends." Dick called him back when he had reached
the door. "You can see the things of which this person writes, and
choose some small thing without value, the smaller the better, to send
as he proposes to--the people she belongs to." This seemed the last
precaution of prudence to make assurance sure.

After this, three days of tumultuous silence till the messenger came
back. He came bringing a description of the funeral, a photograph of
"the poor young lady," and a little ring--a ring which Dick himself had
given her, so long, so long ago. The sight of these relics had an effect
upon him impossible to describe. He had to keep his countenance somehow
till the man had been dismissed. The photograph was taken in fancy dress,
in one of the circus costumes, and was full of all manner of dreadful
accessories; the stage smile, the made-up beauty, the tortured hair: but
there was no difficulty in recognising it. A trembling like palsy seized
upon him as he gazed at it: then he lit his taper once more, and with
a prayer upon his quivering lips burnt it. The ring he twisted up in
paper, and carried out with him in his hand till he reached the muddy,
dark-flowing river, where he dropped it in. Thus all relics and vestiges
of her, poor creature, God forgive her! were vanished and put out of
sight for evermore.

Next day Dick Cavendish, a new man, went once more to Highcombe. He
was not quite the light-hearted fellow he had been. There was a little
emotion about him, a liquid look in the eyes, a faint quiver about the
mouth, which Chatty, when she lifted her soft eyes with a little start
of surprise and consciousness to greet him, perceived at once and set
down to their true cause. Ah yes, it was their true cause. Here he was,
come to offer himself with a past full of the recollections we know,
with a life which had been all but ruined in times gone by, to the
whitest soul he had ever met