ime she had
been delicate. Miss Fancourt added that she believed her husband
overwhelmed by the blow; he would miss her too terribly--she had been
everything in life to him. Paul Overt, on this, immediately wrote to St.
George. He would from the day of their parting have been glad to remain
in communication with him, but had hitherto lacked the right excuse for
troubling so busy a man. Their long nocturnal talk came back to him in
every detail, but this was no bar to an expression of proper sympathy
with the head of the profession, for hadn't that very talk made it clear
that the late accomplished lady was the influence that ruled his life?
What catastrophe could be more cruel than the extinction of such an
influence? This was to be exactly the tone taken by St. George in
answering his young friend upwards of a month later. He made no allusion
of course to their important discussion. He spoke of his wife as frankly
and generously as if he had quite forgotten that occasion, and the
feeling of deep bereavement was visible in his words. "She took
everything off my hands--off my mind. She carried on our life with the
greatest art, the rarest devotion, and I was free, as few men can have
been, to drive my pen, to shut myself up with my trade. This was a rare
service--the highest she could have rendered me. Would I could have
acknowledged it more fitly!"

A certain bewilderment, for our hero, disengaged itself from these
remarks: they struck him as a contradiction, a retractation, strange on
the part of a man who hadn't the excuse of witlessness. He had certainly
not expected his correspondent to rejoice in the death of his wife, and
it was perfectly in order that the rupture of a tie of more than twenty
years should have left him sore. But if she had been so clear a blessing
what in the name of consistency had the dear man meant by turning him
upside down that night--by dosing him to that degree, at the most
sensitive hour of his life, with the doctrine of renunciation? If Mrs.
St. George was an irreparable loss, then her husband's inspired advice
had been a bad joke and renunciation was a mistake. Overt was on the
point of rushing back to London to show that, for his part, he was
perfectly willing to consider it so, and he went so far as to take the
manuscript of the first chapters of his new book out of his table-drawer,
to insert it into a pocket of his portmanteau. This led to his catching
a glimpse of ce