He made no pretence to himself of a factitious tenderness about her. She had been thoroughly antagonistic and distasteful to him of late. She had been the bitter drop flavouring every action, every hope, every minute of his life. He had been the victim of a hard fate, and of the false promises (implied, if not expressed) of Lord Seely. Those paltry sums--those notes that he had taken--he had been driven into committing that action altogether by stress of circumstances. It was strange to himself to think of the light that action would appear in to other people. To his own mind, knowing how it had come to pass in an instant, by the tug of a sudden impulse, it seemed so clear that there was no real ground for blaming him in the matter! He had felt the difficulty of getting money with a severity which the rest of the world probably could not conceive. He was absolutely indifferent to the question of abstract right or wrong, justice or injustice, in the case. But the concrete hardship to himself of being poor he had keenly felt to be undeserved. And now, if it were not for one thing, he should begin to breathe more freely. The one thing that weighed on him with a gloomy, though formless foreboding, was the inquest. He had been obliged to go to Duckwell Farm. He had been asked to look at Castalia's dead body. He had not dared to refuse to do so; but he had requested to be shown into the room where she lay, alone and without witnesses. The room was that sunny parlour where Rhoda Maxfield had sat on many a summer evening, and where the neighbours had discussed the news of his own marriage less than a year ago. But Algernon's imagination did not wander very far from the present. He walked to the window and looked out through the black trellis-work of leafless vine branches. Then he stared at the prints on the walls, and the gay china vases filled with winter nosegays of trembling grass and chrysanthemums. And then his eyes, which had wandered in every other direction, were compelled to turn towards the broad, old-fashioned sofa covered with fair white linen, under which the outlines of a human shape revealed themselves.