swallowed his medicine, and went back to bed again.

Purvis slept; and it may have been that he was glad to sleep on for
ever, for he was tired through and through, and the only way to escape
failure was by death.

His wife mourned for him deeply and sincerely, as many better men have
not been mourned. There was only one thing she dreaded in the whole
world, and that was loneliness. She had endured so much of it in her
lifetime, and now that her husband was gone, whom as a matter of
necessity she had believed in, she was quite alone. She knew nothing
of business, and it never struck her as strange that there should be
money amounting to a considerable little fortune in a box in the house.
With the fear of want removed the poor creature blossomed into
youthfulness again, and she married an engineer on a new railway line,
who was very good to her. To him she ever held up the late lamented
Purvis as one of the best of husbands, and one, too, who had left her
well provided for.

CHAPTER XVII

Peter and Jane were married the following autumn with the ring which
Toffy had kept wrapped up in a piece of tissue paper in his waistcoat
pocket.

For a description of the general rejoicings the almost hysterical
paragraphs in the Culversham local paper must be consulted. Columns of
print were devoted to accounts of feastings and fireworks, tenants'
dinners, and school-children's teas.

In order to understand and really appreciate the full interest of the
occasion one would have had to be at Tetley Place on the morning of the
26th of October last year. Miss Abingdon was in her most bustling, her
most uncompromising mood, and from an early hour of the morning she was
so severe in her speech, and so absolutely radiant in her expression,
that it was very difficult indeed to know how to treat her.

Canon Wrottesley, who still believed that his wife was only feeling the
effects of the winter weather, the spring weather, the summer weather,
or the autumn weather, was as gay and debonair as usual, and even at
the wedding it was felt that he was in some sort the centre of things.
He had his usual group of admirers about him, and was so gracious and
charming, so patriarchal one moment and so boyish the next, that his
popularity was not to be wondered at. The very school-children, as
they threw their flowers, glanced upwards at the canon for his approval.

Mrs. Avory, dressed in black, went very quietly to the wedding with