They had gained the head of the stairs, and were stopping there, apparently hesitating how best to get down. Four of them besides Sir Henry Chandos, and they bore a coffin on their shoulders covered with black cloth—Dr. Laken, Hickens, and two men who looked like carpenters. So! that was it!—the unhappy George Heneage was being removed by night!—and the stairs of the west wing, as I knew later, were too narrow. I could not see, for the hearse was right underneath my window, but I heard the sounds as they put in the coffin, after they had got it safely down. And then the great black thing drove away again, with its slow and covert steps, some of them following it. It was going to the railway station. Sir Harry and Dr. Laken were away for two or three days. The funeral had taken place from the doctor's house. There was no real reason why he might not have been buried from Chandos, except that it would have created so much noise, and put the place up in arms. And so ended the life and history of the ill-fated. George Heneage Chandos. CHAPTER XXXI. BACK FOR AYE AT CHANDOS. Once more there was a light in the gloomy house of Chandos. The blinds were drawn up; the sunlight was allowed to shine in. He who had been the destroyer of its tranquillity and its fair name—through whom, and for whom, they had lived in dread for so many years, having, as Mrs. Penn aptly expressed it, a sword hanging perpetually over their heads, which might fall at any minute—he, the erring man, was laid to rest; and had left rest for them. With him, the fear and the dread were gone—almost the disgrace; there was no further need of secrecy, of retirement, of ghosts, of sleepwalking; there was no longer dread of a night invasion by the police. Chandos could hold up its head now in the face of day. The deep mourning was supposed, by all save a few, to be worn for Sir Thomas Chandos. When Mrs. Chandos appeared in her widow's garb, people at first treated it as one of her eccentricities, but the truth got to be known in time. They put me into mourning too; and it was done in this way. "Would you not like to wear it?" Sir Harry said to me the day he came home. "I think, as you are in the house, one of us, it might be well; also as my future wife. What do you say, Anne? Would you object?" "Indeed I would not object: I should like to wear it. I will order——" and there the state of the case occurred to me, and I sat down in consternation. I had not a shilling in the world. I had no money, either for mourning or for my wedding clothes. The exceeding incongruity of this order of affairs with my position as the future Lady Chandos, struck on me with shame and dismay. What would they all think of me? What reflections of meanness might even the servants not cast upon me? Tears of mortification filled my eyes, nearly dropped upon my burning cheeks. "What's the matter, Anne?" "I have no money."