experience in common. It was his custom to visit her after
nightfall, in her own house, when he could find no opportunity for an
interview elsewhere; and to further this course she would contrive to
leave unfastened a window on the ground-floor overlooking the lawn, by
entering which a back stair-case was accessible; so that he could climb
up to her apartments, and gain audience of his lady when the house was
still.

One dark midnight, when he had not been able to see her during the day,
he made use of this secret method, as he had done many times before; and
when they had remained in company about an hour he declared that it was
time for him to descend.

He would have stayed longer, but that the interview had been a somewhat
painful one. What she had said to him that night had much excited and
angered him, for it had revealed a change in her; cold reason had come to
his lofty wife; she was beginning to have more anxiety about her own
position and prospects than ardour for him. Whether from the agitation
of this perception or not, he was seized with a spasm; he gasped, rose,
and in moving towards the window for air he uttered in a short thick
whisper, 'Oh, my heart!'

With his hand upon his chest he sank down to the floor before he had gone
another step. By the time that she had relighted the candle, which had
been extinguished in case any eye in the opposite grounds should witness
his egress, she found that his poor heart had ceased to beat; and there
rushed upon her mind what his cottage-friends had once told her, that he
was liable to attacks of heart-disease, one of which, the doctor had
informed them, might some day carry him off.

Accustomed as she was to doctoring the other parishioners, nothing that
she could effect upon him in that kind made any difference whatever; and
his stillness, and the increasing coldness of his feet and hands,
disclosed too surely to the affrighted young woman that her husband was
dead indeed. For more than an hour, however, she did not abandon her
efforts to restore him; when she fully realized the fact that he was a
corpse she bent over his body, distracted and bewildered as to what step
she next should take.

Her first feelings had undoubtedly been those of passionate grief at the
loss of him; her second thoughts were concern at her own position as the
daughter of an earl. 'Oh, why, why, my unfortunate husband, did you die
in my chamber at this hour!' she said piteously to