d turn to a
new leaf and begin the next paragraph.

There was a change in the room, and there were changes in the audience,
since Mr. Neal had last looked up from the narrative. A ray of sunshine
was crossing the death-bed; and the child, overcome by drowsiness, lay
peacefully asleep in the golden light. The father's countenance had
altered visibly. Forced into action by the tortured mind, the muscles of
the lower face, which had never moved yet, were moving distortedly now.
Warned by the damps gathering heavily on his forehead, the doctor had
risen to revive the sinking man. On the other side of the bed the wife's
chair stood empty. At the moment when her husband had interrupted the
reading, she had drawn back behind the bed head, out of his sight.
Supporting herself against the wall, she stood there in hiding, her eyes
fastened in hungering suspense on the manuscript in Mr. Neal's hand.

In a minute more the silence was broken again by Mr. Armadale.

"Where is she?" he asked, looking angrily at his wife's empty chair. The
doctor pointed to the place. She had no choice but to come forward. She
came slowly and stood before him.

"You promised to go when I told you," he said. "Go now."

Mr. Neal tried hard to control his hand as it kept his place between the
leaves of the manuscripts but it trembled in spite of him. A suspicion
which had been slowly forcing itself on his mind, while he was reading,
became a certainty when he heard those words. From one revelation to
another the letter had gone on, until it had now reached the brink of a
last disclosure to come. At that brink the dying man had predetermined
to silence the reader's voice, before he had permitted his wife to hear
the narrative read. There was the secret which the son was to know
in after years, and which the mother was never to approach. From that
resolution, his wife's tenderest pleadings had never moved him an
inch--and now, from his own lips, his wife knew it.

She made him no answer. She stood there and looked at him; looked her
last entreaty--perhaps her last farewell. His eyes gave her back no
answering glance: they wandered from her mercilessly to the sleeping
boy. She turned speechless from the bed. Without a look at the
child--without a word to the two strangers breathlessly watching
her--she kept the promise she had given, and in dead silence left the
room.

There was something in the manner of her departure which shook the
self-possession