he
stood mutely regarding the bed for a few minutes, after which he walked
into his own dressing-room adjoining, and there paced up and down. In a
minute or two he noticed what a strange and total silence had come over
the upper part of the house; his own movements, muffled as they were by
the carpet, seemed noisy, and his thoughts to disturb the air like
articulate utterances. His eye glanced through the window. Far down the
road to the harbour a roof detained his gaze: out of it rose a red
chimney, and out of the red chimney a curl of smoke, as from a fire newly
kindled. He had often seen such a sight before. In that house lived
Lucy Savile; and the smoke was from the fire which was regularly lighted
at this time to make her tea.

After that he went back to the bedroom, and stood there some time
regarding his wife's silent form. She was a woman some years older than
himself, but had not by any means overpassed the maturity of good looks
and vigour. Her passionate features, well-defined, firm, and statuesque
in life, were doubly so now: her mouth and brow, beneath her purplish
black hair, showed only too clearly that the turbulency of character
which had made a bear-garden of his house had been no temporary phase of
her existence. While he reflected, he suddenly said to himself, I wonder
if all has been done?

The thought was led up to by his having fancied that his wife's features
lacked in its complete form the expression which he had been accustomed
to associate with the faces of those whose spirits have fled for ever.
The effacement of life was not so marked but that, entering uninformed,
he might have supposed her sleeping. Her complexion was that seen in the
numerous faded portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds; it was pallid in
comparison with life, but there was visible on a close inspection the
remnant of what had once been a flush; the keeping between the cheeks and
the hollows of the face being thus preserved, although positive colour
was gone. Long orange rays of evening sun stole in through chinks in the
blind, striking on the large mirror, and being thence reflected upon the
crimson hangings and woodwork of the heavy bedstead, so that the general
tone of light was remarkably warm; and it was probable that something
might be due to this circumstance. Still the fact impressed him as
strange. Charlson had been gone more than a quarter of an hour: could it
be possible that he had left too soon, and tha