he
line of beauty, touching, as her voice was, to make an undertone of
anguish swell an ecstasy. So he felt it, for his mood was now the
lover's. A torture smote him, to find himself transported by that voice
at his ear to the scene of the young bride in thirty-acre meadow.

'I propose to call on Captain Kirby-Levellier tomorrow, Carinthia,' he
said. 'The name of his house?'

'My brother is not now any more in the English army,' she replied. 'He
has hired a furnished house named Stoneridge.'

'He will receive me, I presume?'

'My brother is a courteous gentleman, my lord.'

'Here is the church, and here we have to part for today. Do we?'

'Good-bye to you, my lord,' she said.

He took her hand and dropped the dead thing.

'Your idea is, to return to Esslemont some day or other?'

'For the present,' was her strange answer.

She bowed, she stepped on. On she sped, leaving him at the stammered
beginning of his appeal to her.

Their parting by the graveyard of the church that had united them was
what the world would class as curious. To him it was a further and a
well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him. He sauntered by the
graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight. It went like a
puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen. Her
vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the
phantom his eyes retained behind them somewhere.

There was in his pocket a memento of Ambrose Mallard, that the family
had given him at his request. He felt the lump. It had an answer for
all perplexities. It had been charged and emptied since it was in his
possession; and it could be charged again. The thing was a volume as
big as the world to study. For the touch of a finger, one could have
its entirely satisfying contents, and fly and be a raven of that night
wherein poor Ambrose wanders lost, but cured of human wounds.

He leaned on the churchyard wall, having the graves to the front of eyes
bent inward. They were Protestant graves, not so impressive to him as
the wreathed and gilt of those under dedication to Feltre's Madonna. But
whatever they were, they had ceased to nurse an injury or feel the pain
for having inflicted it. Their wrinkles had gone from them, whether
of anger or suffering. Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated
ground: and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping
to lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until
p