tremor shook him for a
moment as though the soul were forcibly rending its way from the body.
Then he stretched out his limbs and lay still.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"JENNIE KISSED ME."

It is a bright but chilly May day. In the luxurious sitting-room of Mrs.
Liston-Darcy a coal fire is burning, and in a purple arm-chair before
this genial fire Mrs. Darcy sits.

She is looking very handsome as she sits here, the brilliant morning
sunshine streaming across her dusk beauty and loosely-rippling
hair--very handsome in her rose-pink wrapper, with a soft drift of lace
about the slim throat and wrists. Very handsome, and yet a trifle out of
sorts, too; for the dark, slender brows are contracted, and the brown,
luminous eyes gaze sombrely enough into the depths of the fire. She sits
looping and unlooping in a nervous sort of restlessness the cord and
tassels that bind her slender waist, one slippered foot beating an
impatient tattoo on the hassock, her lips compressed in deep and
unpleasant thought. About the room, great trunks half-packed stand; in
the wardrobe adjoining, her maid is busily folding away dresses.
Evidently an exodus is at hand.

"I cannot go--I shall not go until I see him," she is thinking; "it is
only what I have richly earned, what my treachery of the past deserves,
but it is none the less hard to bear. I cast off his love once, trampled
his heart under my feet; he would be less than man to offer it again to
one so treacherous and unworthy. And Nellie is an angel--who can wonder
that he loves her? It is my just punishment when I have learned how
good, how tender, how noble he is, to see her win him from me--when I
have learned to love him with my whole heart, to see him give his to
her--to lose him in my turn."

She rises with an impatient sigh and walks up and down the room, trying
to crush out the bitter pain of loss--the envy and rebellion that _will_
arise within her as she thinks of Helen Thorndyke the wife of Richard
Gilbert.

For it has come to this--that society begins to whisper Helen will
speedily doff the weeds of widowhood for the pale flowing robes of the
bride.

It is the second May following Laurence Thorndyke's tragic death, one
year and seven months have passed, and the most despairing of widows
will not despair forever. For the last half-year, in a quiet way, Helen
has been going out a good deal, and is very much admired. And yet no
wife had ever grieved more deeply, passionatel