er lips
on her mother's cheek. The dying woman looked at her, with a glance of
helpless inquiry--then looked at Amelius. The doubt in her eyes was too
dreadful to be endured. Arranging the pillows so that she could keep
her raised position in the bed, he signed to Sally to approach him, and
removed the slipper from her left foot. As he took it off, he looked
again at the bed--looked and shuddered. In a moment more, it might be
too late. With his knife he ripped up the stocking, and, lifting her
on the bed, put her bare foot on her mother's lap. "Your child! your
child!" he cried; "I've found your own darling! For God's sake, rouse
yourself! Look!"

She heard him. She lifted her feebly declining head. She looked. She
knew.

For one awful moment, the sinking vital forces rallied, and hurled
back the hold of Death. Her eyes shone radiant with the divine light of
maternal love; an exulting cry of rapture burst from her. Slowly, very
slowly, she bent forward, until her face rested on her daughter's foot.
With a faint sigh of ecstasy she kissed it. The moments passed--and the
bent head was raised no more. The last beat of the heart was a beat of
joy.

BOOK THE EIGHTH. DAME NATURE DECIDES

CHAPTER 1

The day which had united the mother and daughter, only to part them
again in this world for ever, had advanced to evening.

Amelius and Sally were together again in the cottage, sitting by the
library fire. The silence in the room was uninterrupted. On the open
desk, near Amelius, lay the letter which Mrs. Farnaby had written to him
on the morning of her death.

He had found the letter--with the envelope unfastened--on the floor of
the bedchamber, and had fortunately secured it before the landlady and
the servant had ventured back to the room. The doctor, returning a few
minutes afterwards, had warned the two women that a coroner's inquest
would be held in the house, and had vainly cautioned them to be careful
of what they said or did in the interval. Not only the subject of the
death, but a discovery which had followed, revealing the name of the
ill-fated woman marked on her linen, and showing that she had used an
assumed name in taking the lodgings as Mrs. Ronald, became the gossip
of the neighbourhood in a few hours. Under these circumstances, the
catastrophe was made the subject of a paragraph in the evening journals;
the name being added for the information of any surviving relatives
who might be ignorant