t of nursing him, or that I called last thing to ask how he
was."

And that was her farewell message to the very young man with whom a
hole-and-corner scandal had coupled Rachel Minchin's name; it was to be
a final utterance in yet another respect, and one of no slight or
private significance, as the sequel will show. Within a minute or two of
its delivery, Rachel was on her own doorstep for the last time, deftly
and gently turning the latchkey, while the birds sang to frenzy in a
neighboring garden, and the early sun glanced fierily from the brass
knocker and letter-box. Another moment and the door had been flung wide
open by a police officer, who seemed to fill the narrow hall, with a
comrade behind him and both servants on the stairs. And with little
further warning Mrs. Minchin was shown her husband, seated much as she
had left him in the professor's chair, but with his feet raised stiffly
upon another, and the hand of death over every inch of him in the broad
north light that filled the room.

The young widow stood gazing upon her dead, and four pairs of eyes gazed
yet more closely at her. But there was little to gather from the
strained profile with the white cheek and the unyielding lips. Not a cry
had left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped that
instant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettes
against a background of grim tomes. There was no swaying of the lissome
figure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or unspoken. In
moments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is often the way
in which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and complete
detachment, not the least common of immediate results, makes us
sometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would or should;
and it was so with Rachel Minchin in the first moments of her tragic
freedom. So God had sundered whom God had joined together! And this was
the man whom she had married for love; and she could look upon his clay
unmoved! Her mind leapt to a minor consideration, that still made her
shudder, as eight eyes noted from the door; he must have been dead when
she came down and found him seated in shadow; she had misjudged the
dead, if not the living. The pose of the head was unaltered, the chin
upon the chest, the mouth closed in death as naturally as in sleep. No
wonder his wife had been deceived. And yet there was something
unfamiliar, something negligent and noble, and all unlike the l