had," said Mr. Nicholls, when he argued the matter with his own conscience.
An inquest would have done good to nobody; but Mr. Nicholls was very anxious for a post-mortem. He wanted to see if the muscles were much wasted, if the medulla itself showed traces of disease—whether Cruveilhier or Virchow had the best of the argument. But he was not allowed this privilege.
Those early stages of bereavement, while the house was darkened—that sunless autumn day on which the funeral train wound slowly over the moor to the distant burial-ground, the reading of the will, the coming and going of friends and legal advisers, were as an evil dream to Dora Wyllard. She took no part in anything. She affected no interest in anything. Just at the last she was asked if she would not like to lay her offering upon the coffin—one of those costly wreaths, those snow-white crosses of fairest exotics, which had been sent in profusion to the wealthy dead—and she had shrunk from the questioner with a shudder.
"Flowers upon that coffin? No, no, no!"
Yet at the last moment, when the dismal procession was leaving the hall, she appeared suddenly in the midst of the mourners, pale as the dead, and broke through the crowd, and placed her tribute on the coffin-lid, a handful of wild violets gathered with her own hands in the melancholy autumn shrubberies. She bent down and laid her face upon the coffin. "I loved you once!" she moaned, "I loved you once!" And then kind hands drew her away, half-fainting, and led her back to her room.
The blow had quite unsettled poor Mrs. Wyllard's mind, people said afterwards, recounting this episode, at second, third, or fourth hand. No one was surprised when she left Penmorval within a week of the funeral, and went on the Continent with her two old servants, Priscilla and Stodden.
Heathcote and Bothwell had planned everything for her, both being agreed that she must be taken away from the scene of her sorrow as speedily as the thing could be done; and she had obeyed them implicitly, unquestioningly, like a little child.
What could it matter where she went, or what became of her? That was the thought in her own mind when she assented so meekly to every arrangement that was being made for her welfare. What grief that ever widowed heart had to bear could be equal to her agony? It was not the loss of a husband she had adored—that loss for this life which might have been balanced by gain in a better life. It was the extinction of a beloved image for ever. It was the knowledge that this man, to whom she had given the worship of her warm young heart, the enthusiastic regard of inexperienced girlhood, had never been worthy of her love; that he had come to her weary from the disappointment of a more passionate love than life could ever
