Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilise the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?

— EMERSON.

A FORTNIGHT had passed since the drawing of lots, and Lady Newhaven remained in ignorance as to which of the two men had received his death warrant. Few have found suspense easy to bear; but for the self-centred an intolerable element is added to it, which unselfish natures escape. From her early youth Lady Newhaven had been in the habit of viewing life in picturesque tableaux vivants of which she invariably formed the central figure. At her confirmation the Bishop, the white-robed clergy, and the other candidates had served but as a nebulous background against which her own white-clad, kneeling figure, bowed in reverent devotion, stood out in high relief.

When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a part, though a necessary one, in the wedding groups that their completeness had never been marred by misgivings as to his exact position in them. When, six years later, after one or two mild flirtations which only served as a stimulus to her love of dress, when at last she met, as she would have expressed it, “the one love of her life,” her first fluctuations and final deviation from the path of honour were the result of new arrangements round the same centre.

The first groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue. The young mother with the Madonna face — Lady Newhaven firmly believed that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows, resembled that of a Madonna — with her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the contemplation of such impregnable virtue.

“You accuse me of coldness,” she had imagined herself saying in a later scene, when the children and the husband would have made too much of a crowd, and were consequently omitted. “I wish to heaven I were as cold as I appear.”

And she had really said it later on. Hugh never did accuse her of coldness, but that was a detail. Those words, conned over many times, had nevertheless actually proceeded out of her mouth. Few of us have the power of saying anything we intend to say. But Lady Newhaven had that power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity between her remarks and the occasion which called them forth.

From an early date in their married life Lord Newhaven had been in the habit of discounting these remarks by making them in rapid rotation himself before proceeding to the matter in hand.

“Having noticed that a mother — I mean a young mother — is never really happy in the absence of her children, and that their affection makes up for the carelessness of their father, may I ask, Violet, what day you wish to return to Westhope?” he said one morning at breakfast.

“Any day,” she replied. “I am as miserable in one place as in another.”

“We will say Friday week, then,” returned Lord Newhaven, ignoring, as he invariably did, any allusions to their relative position, and because he ignored them she made many. “The country,” he added, hurriedly, “will be very refreshing after the glare and dust and empty worldly society of London.”

She looked at him in anger. She did not understand the reason, but she had long vaguely felt that all conversation seemed to dry up in his presence. He mopped it all into his own sponge, so to speak, and left every subject exhausted.

She rose in silent dignity, and went to her boudoir and lay down there. The heat was very great, and another fire was burning within her, withering her round cheek, and making her small plump hand look shrunk and thin. A fortnight had passed, and she had not heard from Hugh. She had written to him many times, at first only imploring him to meet her, but afterwards telling him she knew what had happened, and entreating him to put her out of suspense, to send her one line that his life was not endangered. She had received no answer to any of her letters. She came to the conclusion that they had been intercepted by Lord Newhaven, and that no doubt the same fate had befallen Hugh’s letters to herself. For some time past, before the drawing of lots, she had noticed that Hugh’s letters had become less frequent and shorter in length. She understood the reason now. Half of them had been intercepted. How that fact could account for the shortness of the remainder may not be immediately apparent to the prosaic mind, but it was obvious to Lady Newhaven. That Hugh had begun to weary of her could not force the narrow entrance to her mind. Such a possibility had never been even considered in the pictures of the future with which her imagination busied itself. But what would the future be? The road along which she was walking forked before her eyes, and her usual perspicacity was at fault. She knew not in which of those two diverging paths the future would lie.

Would she in eighteen months’ time — she should certainly refuse to marry within the year — be standing at the altar in a “confection” of lilac and white with Hugh; or would she be a miserable wife, moving ghostlike about her house, in coloured raiment, while a distant grave was always white with flowers sent by a nameless friend of the dead? “How some one must have loved him,” she imagined Hugh’s aged mother saying. And once, as that bereaved mother came in the dusk to weep beside the grave, did she not see a shadowy figure start up black-robed from the flower-laden sod, and hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful despairing face, glide away among the trees? At this point Lady Newhaven always began to cry. It was too heart-rending. And her mind in violent recoil was caught once more and broken on the same wheel. “Which? Which?”

A servant entered.

“Would her ladyship see Miss West for a few minutes?”

“Yes,” said Lady Newhaven, glad to be delivered from herself, if only by the presence of an acquaintance.

“It is very charitable of you to see me,” said Rachel. “Personally, I think morning calls ought to be a penal offence. But I came at the entreaty of a former servant of yours. I feel sure you will let me carry some message of forgiveness to her as she is dying. Her name is Morgan. Do you remember her?”

“I once had a maid called Morgan,” said Lady Newhaven. “She was drunken, and I had to part with her in the end; but I kept her as long as I could in spite of it. She had a genius for hair-dressing.”

“She took your diamond heart pendant,” continued Rachel. “She was never found out. She can’t return............