Tearless, and with his calm, every-day manner, Churchill Penwyn made all arrangements for his wife’s funeral. The smallest details were not too insignificant for his attention. He opened all letters of condolence, arranged who, of the many who loved his wife, should be permitted to accompany her in that last solemn journey. He chose the grave where she was to lie—not in the stony vault of the Penwyns—but on the sunny slope of the hill, where summer breezes and summer birds should flit across her grave, and all the varying lights and colours of sky and cloud glorify and adorn it. Yet, in those few solemn days between death and burial, he contrived to spend the greater part of his time near that beloved clay. His only rest—or pretence of rest—was taken on a sofa in his wife’s dressing-room adjoining the spacious chamber, where, beneath whitest draperies, strewn with late roses and autumn violets, lay that marble form. In the dead of night he spent long hours alone in that taper-lit bedchamber, kneeling beside the snowy bed—kneeling, and holding such commune as he might with that dear spirit hovering near him, and wondering dimly whether the dream of philosophers, the pious hope of Christians, were true, and there were verily a world where they two might see and know each other again. Sir Nugent Bellingham had been telegraphed to at divers places, but having wandered into inaccessible regions on the borders of Hungary, to shoot big game with an Hungarian noble of vast wealth and almost regal surroundings, the only message that reached him had arrived on the very day of his daughter’s death. He reached Penwyn Manor, after travelling with all possible speed, in time for the funeral, altogether broken down by the shock which greeted him on his arrival. It had been a pleasant thing for him to lapse back into his old easy-going bachelor life—to feel himself a young man again—when his two daughters were safely provided for; but it was not the less a grief to lose the noble girl he had been at once proud and fond of. The funeral train was longer than Churchill had planned, for his arrangements had included only the elect of the neighbourhood. All the poor whom Madge had cared for,—strong men and matrons, feeble old men and women, and little children,—came to swell the ranks of her mourners, dressed in rusty black—decent, tearful, reverent as at the shrine of a saint. ‘We have lost a friend such as we never had before and shall never see again.’ That was the cry which went up from Penwyn village, and many a hamlet far afield, whither Madge’s bounty had penetrated—where the sound of her carriage wheels had been the harbinger of joy.