round. Good-bye, Richard."

With his name it began and ended. Even to herself Clare was not
over-communicative. The book was slender, yet her nineteen years of
existence left half the number of pages white.

Those last words drew him irresistibly to gaze on her. There she lay,
the same impassive Clare. For a moment he wondered she had not moved--to
him she had become so different. She who had just filled his ears with
strange tidings--it was not possible to think her dead! She seemed to
have been speaking to him all through his life. His image was on that
still heart.

He dismissed the night-watchers from the room, and remained with her
alone, till the sense of death oppressed him, and then the shock sent
him to the window to look for sky and stars. Behind a low broad pine,
hung with frosty mist, he heard a bell-wether of the flock in the silent
fold. Death in life it sounded.

The mother found him praying at the foot of Clare's bed. She knelt by
his side, and they prayed, and their joint sobs shook their bodies, but
neither of them shed many tears. They held a dark unspoken secret in
common. They prayed God to forgive her.

Clare was buried in the family vault of the Todhunters. Her mother
breathed no wish to have her lying at Lobourne.

After the funeral, what they alone upon earth knew brought them
together.

"Richard," she said, "the worst is over for me. I have no one to love
but you, dear. We have all been fighting against God, and this...
Richard! you will come with me, and be united to your wife, and spare my
brother what I suffer."

He answered the broken spirit: "I have killed one. She sees me as I am.
I cannot go with you to my wife, because I am not worthy to touch her
hand, and were I to go, I should do this to silence my self-contempt.
Go you to her, and when she asks of me, say I have a death upon my head
that--No! say that I am abroad, seeking for that which shall cleanse me.
If I find it I shall come to claim her. If not, God help us all!"

She had no strength to contest his solemn words, or stay him, and he
went forth.

CHAPTER XLI

A man with a beard saluted the wise youth Adrian in the full blaze of
Piccadilly with a clap on the shoulder. Adrian glanced leisurely behind.

"Do you want to try my nerves, my dear fellow? I'm not a man of fashion,
happily, or you would have struck the seat of them. How are you?"

That was his welcome to Austin Wentworth after his long absence.

Au