God bless us, what an awful
thing, sir, after what has happened already, to happen in your house!"

Warrender answered with a nod,--he had no heart to speak; and, refusing
the dogcart, he set out on his walk home. An exquisite summer night:
everything harsh stilled out of the atmosphere; the sounds of labour
ceasing; a calm as of profoundest peace stealing over everything. The
soft and subdued pain of his natural grief, hushed by that fatigue and
exhaustion of both body and mind which a long strain produces, was not
out of accord with the calm of nature. But very different was the harsh
note of the new calamity, which had struck not the house in which the
tragedy was being enacted, but this one, which lay bare and naked in the
last light of the sinking sun. So young and so careless! So young, so
wasteful of life and all that life had to give, and now parted from it,
taken from it at a blow!

CHAPTER VI.

Lord Markland died at the Warren that night. He never recovered
consciousness, nor knew that his wife was by his side through all the
dreadful darkening of the summer evening, which seemed to image forth
in every new tone of gathering gloom the going out of life. They told
her as much as was necessary of the circumstances,--how, the distance
between the Warren and the churchyard being so short, and the whole
cortege on foot, Lord Markland's carriage had been left in the village;
how he had stayed there to luncheon (presumably with the rector, for no
particulars were given, nor did the bewildered young woman ask for any),
which was the reason of his delay. The rest was very easily explained:
everybody had said to him that "some accident" would happen one day or
other with the horses he insisted on driving, and the prophecy had been
fulfilled. Such prophecies are always fulfilled. Lady Markland was very
quiet, accepting that extraordinary revolution in her life with a look
of marble, and words that betrayed nothing. Was she broken-hearted? was
she only stunned by the suddenness, the awe, of such a catastrophe? The
boy clung to her, yet without a tear, pale and silent, but never, even
when the words were said that all was over, breaking forth into any
childish outburst. He sat on the floor in her shadow, even when she was
watching by the deathbed, never left her, keeping always a hold upon her
arm, her hand, or her dress. Mrs. Warrender would have taken him away,
and put him to bed,--it was so bad for him; but t