remained in ignorance as to which of the two men had received his
death-warrant. Few have found suspense easy to bear; but for the
self-centred an intolerable element is added to it, which unselfish
natures escape. From her early youth Lady Newhaven had been in the habit
of viewing life in picturesque _tableaux vivants_ of which she
invariably formed the central figure. At her confirmation the Bishop,
the white-robed clergy, and the other candidates had served but as a
nebulous background against which her own white-clad, kneeling figure,
bowed in reverent devotion, stood out in high relief.

When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a part, though a
necessary one, in the wedding groups that their completeness had never
been marred by misgivings as to his exact position in them. When, six
years later, after one or two mild flirtations which only served as a
stimulus to her love of dress--when at last she met, as she would have
expressed it, "the one love of her life," her first fluctuations and
final deviation from the path of honor were the result of new
arrangements round the same centre.

The first groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue.
The young mother with the Madonna face--Lady Newhaven firmly believed
that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows,
resembled that of a Madonna--with her children round her, Lord Newhaven
as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young,
handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the
contemplation of such impregnable virtue.

"You accuse me of coldness," she had imagined herself saying in a later
scene, when the children and the husband would have made too much of a
crowd, and were consequently omitted. "I wish to Heaven I were as cold
as I appear."

And she had really said it later on. Hugh never did accuse her of
coldness, but that was a detail. Those words, conned over many times,
had nevertheless actually proceeded out of her mouth. Few of us have the
power of saying anything we intend to say. But Lady Newhaven had that
power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her
prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a
premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity
between her remarks and the occasion which called them forth.

From an early date in their married life Lord Newhaven had been in the
habit of discounting these remarks by making them in r