t was hard, and he sat beside his dying wife, with anger and envy
gnawing his heart--anger against fate, envy of Roderick Vawdrey, who
had won the prize. If evil wishes could have killed, neither Violet nor
her lover would have outlived that summer. Happily the Captain was too
cautious a man to be guilty of any overt act of rage or hatred. His
rancorous feelings were decently hidden under a gentlemanly iciness of
manner, to which no one could take objection.

The fatal hour came unawares, one calm September afternoon, about six
weeks after Violet's return from Jersey. Captain Winstanley had been
reading one of Tennyson's idyls to his wife, till she sank into a
gentle slumber. He left her, with Pauline seated at work by one of the
windows, and went to his study to write some letters. Five o'clock was
the established hour for kettledrum, but of late the invalid had been
unable to bear even the mild excitement of two or three visitors at
this time. Violet now attended alone to her mother's afternoon tea,
kneeling by her side as she sipped the refreshing infusion, and coaxing
her to eat a waferlike slice of bread-and-butter, or a few morsels of
sponge-cake.

This afternoon, when Violet went softly into the room, carrying the
little Japanese tray and tiny teapot, she found her mother lying just
as the Captain had left her an hour before.

"She's been sleeping so sweetly, miss," whispered Pauline. "I never
knew her sleep so quiet since she's been ill."

That stillness which seemed so good a thing to the handmaid frightened
the daughter. Violet set her tray down hastily on the nearest table,
and ran to her mother's sofa. She looked at the pale and sunken cheek,
just visible in the downy hollow of the pillows; she touched the hand
lying on the silken coverlet. That marble coldness, that waxen hue of
the cheek, told her the awful truth. She fell on her knees beside the
sofa, with a cry of sharp and sudden sorrow.

"Oh mother, mother! I ought to have loved you better all my life!"

CHAPTER XI.

The Bluebeard Chamber.

The day before the funeral Captain Winstanley received a letter from
his stepdaughter, offering to execute any deed he might choose to have
prepared, settling upon him the income which his wife was to have had
after Violet's majority.

"I know that you are a heavy loser by my mother's death," she wrote,
"and I shall be glad to do anything in my power to lessen that loss. I
know well that it was her