“A lady to see me?” asked Susannah, shrinking. She could not bring herself to face the sympathy or curiosity of acquaintances. The address of their present quiet lodging had not been published abroad, and the house in the Haymarket was in the hands of my lord’s creditors. She could not imagine who, with any other motive but that of inquisitiveness, this might be inquiring for her. She thought there was none to take any interest in the survivors of the fallen house of Lyndwood.

“A lady,” the little slim maid repeated. “Her name, madam, is Miss Boyle.”

“Oh, Selina!” Susannah caught her breath. “Bring her here.”

The servant closed the door and Miss Chressham gave a little shudder.

The dreary, heavily furnished room, the outlook through the long bare windows on to the blank houses opposite, the strangeness of everything, even to her own plain dark dress, were a fitting background to her secret tragedy. She wondered dully how she could bear it, and shuddered again.

But there were others to think of, as there always were in the life of Susannah Chressham.

She went to the folding doors at the back of the room and softly opened them on to a darkened bedchamber.

“Do you want anything, Aunt Agatha?” she asked gently.

From the curtained bed came a muffled answer.

“No, no.”

Susannah looked pityingly at the outline of my lady’s slight figure huddled on the tumbled pillows.

The Countess was attired in the gay silks of her former splendour. One hand was over her face; in the other she held a miniature, not that of her still unburied son, but that of her husband, fifteen years dead.

“Selina Boyle is here; she need not disturb you.”

“Where is Marius?” moaned my lady. “Is he never coming?”

“He could not be here before to-night,” said Miss Chressham for the hundredth time that day.

The Countess made no answer, and Susannah quietly withdrew, closing the doors as Selina Boyle entered the outer chamber.

For a moment the two ladies looked at each other with wild eyes, then Selina Boyle crossed the room and kissed Susannah on the cheek.

“Oh, my dear!” said Miss Chressham brokenly.

“I am very well,” answered Selina, in a voice that sounded weak and hoarse. “I have just come up to town. I told my father; he brought me. I am very well.”

She sank on to one of the torn striped chairs and loosened her black cloak. Her hair hung in disordered curls under her straw hat, her face was flushed, her lips feverish.

“I thought that you would come, but I did not expect you so soon,” said Susannah, under her breath. “You received my letter?”

“Yes, and I saw it—in the paper.”

Susannah looked at her tenderly.

“I fear you are wearied to death.”

Miss Boyle took off her hat; there was a tacit avoidance in their speech of that which filled the thoughts of both.

“We have been travelling all night, but I am not tired.”

“We will have some tea.” Susannah rang the bell. “We are very humble here; it is but temporary.”

“Why did you leave home—the other place—so soon?” asked Miss Boyle faintly.

“It was not ours; we had no right,” answered Susannah. “And I could not bear to stay; we moved at once. This is our first day here.”

My lord had been two days dead—only two days. They glanced away from each other.

“How is my lady?” breathed Selina.

“She is not well, I fear. She lives only for the coming of Marius.”

“She is here?”

“Yes, but she will see no one.”

The maid-servant, treading softly, in awe of the visitor who had driven up in a coach, entered and set the tea.

“What time is it?” Susannah asked. There was no clock in the room, and she had left her watch, with every other article of jewellery, behind in the house in the Haymarket.

“Nearly four o’clock, madam.”

“Thank you.” Miss Chressham dismissed her, and commenced pouring out the tea.

Selina took a cup obediently, but could not eat.

“I am a little sick with travelling,” she said.

Susannah observed her covertly, wondering how much she guessed. Was she still in her fairyland? Miss Chressham thought so.

“Do you know Lord Sandys?” asked Selina.

“I have seen him,” answered Susannah.

Miss Boyle raised blurred eyes.

“I saw him once, when they played The Rival Queens. My lord was in the box with me. The lady he married was with him.”

Susannah looked into her cup.

“You saw my lord but recently?”

Selina quivered.

“We said good-bye. We—this does not matter for me; it was over.”

“For you and him?” asked Susannah softly.

“What could there have been?” The tears ran slowly down her cheeks, but she smiled. “And what can it matter? He loved me, Susannah, he loved me!”

Miss Chressham was silent.

Selina wiped away the tears, and fixed her poor scalded eyes on Susannah.

“He came to tell me so again.”

“I know; he told me that he was going to ask you to be his wife.”

“We have always loved each other,” said Selina simply, “and we have been unfortunate. For me this does not matter, and for him——”

“He might have died more nobly.”

Selina shook her head.

“We do not know; it was some worthy quarrel.”

Again Miss Chressham was silent; she, like Selina, was ignorant how exactly my lord had met his death—a flare-up of temper, a wanton insult. Those who had seen him die had nothing more to say. No one knew why he was in the churchyard of St. Ann’s at that hour. Susannah, who knew nothing of the flowers, guessed; Selina, who remembered them, did not.

“I never thought to see him again,” continued Selina, with trembling lips; “but if it might have been I——”

“You must live to think of him,” said Susannah tenderly. “Ah, my dear, he did not die wholly miserably if he left you behind to mourn him.”

She rose and went on her knees beside Selina’s low chair, and both were clasped tightly in each other’s arms in an overwhelming impulse of sad affection.

Miss Chressham kissed the bowed, delicate head resting on her shoulder, saying in her soul: “She will never know, thank God! She will never know!” She herself, who did know the man for whom she grieved, she who had given all her love to one who did not ever hear of it, she who must guard her secret, uncomforted, to the end, could yet conceal her deeper anguish to soothe with her strong sympathy the woman who believed in her beloved.

“I think you must not weep for him,” she said softly. “He lived his life. There were no better years before him than those that he had known. He died young and splendid; he did not have to face ruin, a fallen position; he had rich tastes and lordly habits; he did not have to feel the bitterness of inadequacy.” And in her heart she added: He did not break the dream of a woman who truly loved him by selling himself a second time. He died while he was still, in one woman’s eyes, all she would have had him. And for that Susannah Chressham was grateful.

“I do not weep for him,” murmured Selina, “only I am tired.”

She raised her head.

“Why should we mourn for him, Susannah? I do not think he could have wished to live.”

Miss Chressham kissed her hot cheek.

“You are very brave, sweet——”

There was a little pause, then Selina spoke.

“Will you come with me—to see him?”

Susannah turned her face away.

“I—I dare not speak of that.”

“It is very terrible,” shuddered Selina, clinging to her, “but I think I must go.”

“Do you know what they are doing?”

Miss Boyle closed her eyes.

“I know.”

Miss Chressham put her aside and rose.

“They are showing him for money,” she said, in a tone of uncontrolled agony. “My God, how can one bear it?”

“You—you could do nothing?”

Susannah answered fiercely.

“Why do you ask me that, Selina? Do you think that I have not tried? And he has friends; but my lord’s dead face was one of my lord’s best assets, and there is not a woman in London hath not been to see him—paying gold for it.”

“Ah, forgive me!” said Miss Boyle, in a broken voice. “I have been forgetting what it is to you—you who are of his house; and you were fond of him.”

“Yes, I was fond of him,” answered Susannah, with a short laugh, “but I could not spare him this. What are they, these men who make their profit of the dead?”

Miss Boyle rose.

“I must go,” she said feverishly. “Would you forsake him, Susannah, because he hath strangers about him? When so many look on him for curiosity, shall not some look on him for love? I must go, if it kills me.”

Susannah gazed at her questioningly.

“Could you bear it?”

“I could not bear to stay away,” answered Miss Boyle, raising her wan face. “And my lady—hath my lady been?”

“No.” Susannah clenched her hands.

“To-morrow they give him a fine funeral, a spectacle for the town; and then my lady will go to ride in the pageant, and weep at the window of her coach.”

“You speak bitterly.”

“God forgive me, I have no right; but I do not think that she loved him. It was always Marius.”

Selina picked up her hat.

“I am going,” she said. “And you——”

Their eyes met.

“I will come.”

“At once,” whispered Miss Boyle.

“Yes; I will fetch my cloak.”

She went softly into the bedchamber, closing the door after her, and Selina stood leaning against the mantelpiece, fastening her pelisse over her grey dress.

It had been a cloudy day, but now the sun was shining fitfully through the long window on to the worn furniture and dark walls. A straight beam fell across a row of prints in black frames that hung opposite. Miss Boyle raised her eyes and looked at them.

The title, engraved finely beneath each subject, seemed to start out and be written on the sunlight:

“THE RAKE’S PROGRESS.”

Mr. Hogarth’s terrible pictures; she had seen them and shuddered over them before.

“The Rake’s Progress.”

“Susannah!” she cried on a sobbing breath.

Miss Chressham entered from the bedchamber.

&............