Preceded by Clare, and accompanied by Violet, Trevor Chute entered the apartment of Ida Beverley, a species of little drawing-room, appropriated to her own use, and where, when not driving in the Park, she spent most of the day, apart from everyone. Ere they entered, Clare again touched his arm lightly, and whispered, 'Be careful in all you say.' 'Be assured that I shall.' 'Thanks, for poor Ida looks as though she would never smile again.' Though warned by these words to expect some marked change in the beautiful coquette who had been the sun of Beverley's life, and who had taken nearly all the life out of the less luckless Jerry Vane, the visitor was greatly shocked by the appearance of Ida, who rose from her easy-chair to receive him with the saddest of smiles on one of the sweetest of faces--Ida, who had the richest and brightest auburn hair in London, and the 'most divine complexion in the same big village by the Thames,' as Beverley used to boast many a time and oft, when he and Trevor were far, far away from home and her. Her beauty had become strangely ethereal; her complexion purer, even, and more waxen than ever; her eyes seemed larger, but clearer, more lustrous, and filled at times with a far-seeing expression, and they were long-lashed and heavily lidded. Her hands seemed very thin and white, yet so pink in the palms. To Trevor Chute she had the appearance of one in consumption; but strange to say, poor Jerry Vane, who still loved her so well, saw nothing of all this, even when meeting her at intervals. She received Trevor Chute with outstretched hands, and with an _empressement_ which, perhaps, her elder sister envied; she invited him to sit close by her side, and to tell her all he knew, all he could remember, and every detail of Beverley's last hours; but to do this, after the warning he had received from Clare, required all the tact, ingenuity, and delicacy that Chute was master of. She had become composed and calm during the past months; but now the proffered relics brought so vividly and painfully before her the individuality of the dead, the handsome young husband she had lost, that a heavy outburst of anguish was the result, as all expected. There were rings, each of which had its own story; a miniature of herself, with a lock of her auburn hair behind it; there were his medals and his Victoria cross, gained by an act of bravery among the hills, his sword and sash: all were kissed with quivering lips, commented on, and wept over again and again, not noisily or obstreperously, but with a quiet, gentle, subdued, and ladylike grief that proved very touching, especially in one so young and so beautiful in her deep crape dress; and Trevor Chute, as he observed all this, began to think that even yet his friend Vane's chances of regaining the widow's heart were of the slightest kind. 'I knew, Trevor Chute,' said she, after a pause, 'that I should never, never see him again!' 'How?' he asked.