No wonder she had loved him. He had inherited her own handsome features, and dark marked brows, and lithe slim form. But his disposition had not been like hers. He lacked her waywardness, her excitability. He had been a sunny-faced, sunny-hearted lad, and to see him lying thus--mute, white, and still--was inexpressibly painful. They watched him hour after hour. The sun dipped behind the green hills that lay to the west, and slowly the summer daylight began to fade, and still there was no change. Mrs. Layton crept noiselessly out of the room to go down to the vicarage to see after her husband and household, but all the rest remained. The gray-haired father sat at one side of the bed, and at the other the mother knelt. From time to time the doctor felt the small brown wrist that lay outside the coverlet, and the old nurse by the window was praying silently. But Mrs. Temple breathed no prayer. In her heart was hot revolt and despair. She never took her eyes from her boy's face, and her expression told her anguish. Once the doctor poured her out some wine, but she put it from her with a gesture of loathing. And so the numbered hours stole on. Presently a new light shone into the room--a soft pale radiancy--and the moonbeams lit the dying face. They fell on it more than an hour, and then a faint change took place in the breathing. The doctor bent down and listened; the father drew a gasping sigh. It was the passing away of the young soul; and a moment or two later they were forced to tell Mrs. Temple that she was childless. Then the pent-up anguish broke loose. The bereaved mother caught the dead boy in her arms, and called to him by every endearing name to come back to her. "Come back, my darling, my darling; do not leave me alone!" she shrieked in her despair. They sent for her mother, but the very presence of Mrs. Layton seemed still further to excite her. "But for you," she cried, turning on her mother in her frantic grief, "he would never have been born! But for you I would have been with George--George Hill, from whom you parted me!" It was a most painful scene. Mrs. Layton drew the gray-haired old squire out of the room, and tried to whisper some words of comfort in his ear. "Grief has made poor Rachel beside herself," she said. "Fancy her talking of George Hill now, when the poor fellow has been dead over ten years. They were children together, you know." But Mr. Temple made no answer. He knew very well that his wife was speaking the truth, and that his mother-in-law was not. He turned from Mrs. Layton and went into his library, and sat there alone, thinking. The boy's death had changed everything. Mr. Temple was a rich man, for besides his own large property, he had in his youth married for his first wife the daughter and heiress of Sir Richard Devon, whose estates marched with his own. At her death this lady had left everything she possessed to her husband, and thus Mr. Temple was one of the largest land-owners in the country.