t as furtive and suppressed as
that of one who steals from a death chamber. Maurice sat down upon the
bed and again listened for a long time.

He was conscious of the sense of relief which comes upon a man who,
through some sudden act, has removed from his shoulders a terrible
burden. He took this present silence to himself as a reward. But would
it last? Opening the window he leaned out to hear the sea more plainly.
All living voices, whether of Nature or of man, were beautiful to him,
they had come to make his silence.

A servant knocked at the door. Maurice went down to dine. He passed the
late evening as usual in his study. He slept calmly. He woke--to
silence. Did not this silence confirm his fixed idea that his marriage
with Lily had vexed that wakeful spirit, had troubled that unquiet soul
of the child? Maurice, wrapped in a beautiful peace, felt that it did.
And, as the silent lovely days, the silent lovely nights passed on he
came gradually to a fixed resolve.

Lily must not return to him, must not live with him again.

He pondered for a long time how he was to compass their further
separation. And, at length, he sat down and wrote a letter to Lily
telling her the exact truth.

"Think me cruel, selfish," he wrote at the end of his letter. "I am
cruel. I am selfish. Despair has made me so. The fear of madness has
made me so. I must have peace. I must and will have it, at whatever
cost."

He sent this letter to the _poste restante_ at Windermere, as Lily had
directed. She and her father were moving about in the Lake district, and
did not know from day to day where they might be. He received a reply
within a week. It reached him at breakfast time, and, happening to
glance at the postmark before he opened it, his face suddenly flushed
and his heart beat with violence. For the letter came from that lonely
village in that sequestered mountain valley in which he had once lived,
in which he had first heard the cry of the child. What chance had led
Lily's steps there? Maurice read the letter eagerly. It was very gentle,
very submissive. And there was one strange passage in it:

"I understand that you are at peace," Lily wrote. "Yet the child is not
at peace. It is crying still. You will ask me how I know that. Do not
ask me now. Some day I shall send for you and tell you. When I send for
you, if it is by day or night, promise that you will come to me. I claim
this promise from you. And now good-bye for a time. M