telling, she had quoted Mr.
Dockerell as an authority on Portugal laurels.

"Ah, my cousin, Mr. Dockerell," said Mrs. Manson, "you knew him, did
you? He's dead, poor man, had you heard? He died last year."

And once started upon Mr. Dockerell, she rambled away with his life's
history, being one without much feeling, who could say everything to
anybody.

"Poor Fred, his marriage was such a mistake. She was older than him, and
a mass of nerves. She caught him. I always said it was that; anybody on
earth could have caught him. It was at Worthing; those seaside places in
the summer are very dangerous. My mother used to say: 'We must be
thankful it isn't worse.' No, he wasn't happy. There was a story that
he really liked somebody else: a Miss Simon her name was--Simon, or
something like that. Where did she come from? Oh yes, Willstead; he had
some work there at one time. 'The beautiful dark Miss Simon.' At least,
she wasn't beautiful, that was our joke; there was a pretty sister, but
she was fair. My sister always insisted he was pining after her, but
that wasn't like Fred. We used to be hard-hearted, and declare it was
indigestion."

Mr. Dockerell's death was not very much to Henrietta, he had passed so
entirely out of her life. But "a dark Miss Simon living at Willstead,
not beautiful"; she thought much of that. She could not but believe it
must be herself. "So perhaps after all he did care," she said to
herself, as she sat over the fire that evening, she had reached the age
when she liked a good deal of twilight thinking undisturbed by the gas.
But the news had come so late; if only she had known before. Those
months and years of unhappiness rose before her. Granted that Providence
had decreed they were not to marry, and looking back she did not feel as
if she wished they had married, it was all so far behind her, she
thought that she might have been given the happiness of a farewell
letter from him, telling her that she really was first in his heart. "I
should never have seen him or heard from him again; of course I should
not have wanted it, but it would have been so comfortable to have
known." She fell into her childhood's habit of daydreams, if one can
have daydreams of the past, and sat such a long time absorbed that Annie
came in at last with her matchbox. "Don't you want the gas lit, 'm? You
never rang, I was gettin' quite fidgettin' about you, your heart's not
very strong."

Henrietta was composing his last