Was that stiff, white, silent thing Castalia? He could not realise it. He would scarcely have started if the door had opened and his wife had walked into the room in her ordinary dress, and with her ordinary gait. He had seen her last full of passionate excitement. That stiff, white, silent thing could not be she. He would not lift the coverlet, though, nor look on that which lay beneath. But he stood and gazed at it until the heap beneath the linen sheet seemed to stir and change its outlines. Then he turned away shuddering to the window, and looked at his watch to see whether he might venture to leave the room yet. Would the people think he had been there too short a time? He came out at length, looking pale and depressed enough to excite a good deal of sympathy in the breast of Mrs. Seth Maxfield. And with his usual quick susceptibility to the impression he produced on others, he was fully aware of this, and gratified by it, despite the chill vision of the still white heap under the coverlet which persistently haunted his memory. He saw looks of pity; he heard whispered exclamations of admiration, and they did more than gratify, they reassured him. It had entered into nobody's mind to conceive that he had been the cause of his wife's death. Into whose head, indeed, should it enter? or how? He remembered the last lightning-quick glance he had cast over the wide meadows, and how it had shown them to him empty and bare of any living thing for as far as his eye could reach. No; he was safe from suspicion. Of course he was safe from suspicion! And yet--he would have given a year of his life to have the inquest over, and the dead woman safely put away beneath the daisies in Duckwell churchyard. Meanwhile the mortal frame that had so throbbed and suffered for his sake, lay there lonely and neglected. Strangers' hands had composed it decently; a stranger's roof sheltered it. It was to lie in a stranger's grave. Only one woman came and stood beside the couch in the sunny parlour, and looked on the dead shape with eyes full of compassionate tears; and, before going away, laid some sprays of fern and delicate hothouse blossoms on the quiet breast, and fastened there a curl of light hair. The hair had been cut jestingly from Algernon Errington's head when he was a school-boy, and then put away and forgotten for years. It now lay above his dead wife's heart. "She was so fond of him, poor soul!" said the compassionate woman. It was Minnie Bodkin. CHAPTER XXII.