neither spoke a word. At the door of her lodgings, Iris looked into her
companion's face, and said in a tremulous voice:

"I am sure you will be elected! I'm certain of it!"

Dyce laughed, pressed her hand, and, as the door opened, walked away
through the storm.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Lord Dymchurch went down into Somerset. His younger sister was in a
worse state of health than he had been led to suppose; there could be
no thought of removing her from home. A day or two later, her malady
took a hopeless turn, and by the end of the week she was dead.

A month after this, the surviving daughter of the house, seeking solace
in the ancient faith to which she had long inclined, joined a religious
community. Dymchurch was left alone.

Since his abrupt departure from Rivenoak, he had lived a silent life,
spending the greater part of every day in solitude. Grief was not
sufficient to account for the heaviness and muteness which had fallen
upon him, or for the sudden change by which his youthful-looking
countenance had become that of a middle-aged man. He seemed to shrink
before eyes that regarded him, however kind their expression; one might
have thought that some secret shame was harassing his mind. He himself,
indeed, would have used no other word to describe the ill under which
he suffered. Looking back on that strange episode of his life which
began with his introduction to Mrs. Toplady and ended in the park at
Rivenoak, he was stung almost beyond endurance by a sense of
ignominious folly. On his lonely walks, and in the silence of sleepless
nights, he often gesticulated and groaned like a man in pain. His
nerves became so shaken that at times he could hardly raise a glass or
cup to his lips without spilling the contents. Poverty and loneliness
he had known, and had learnt to bear them with equanimity; for the
first time he was tasting humiliation.

Incessantly be reviewed the stages of his foolishness and, as he deemed
it, of his dishonour. But he had lost the power to understand that
phantasm of himself which pranked so grotesquely in the retrospect. Was
it true that he had reasoned and taken deliberate step after step in
the wooing of Lady Ogram's niece? Might he not urge in his excuse, to
cloak him from his own and the world's contempt, some unsuspected
calenture, for which, had he known, he ought to have taken medical
advice? When, in self-chastisement, he tried to summon before his
mind's eye the image of Ma