He made no attempt to see Lucy on his return from Madeira. In this he was governed by a supreme delicacy of feeling. “While Emily lives I belong to her,” he said to himself. “I am bound by a tie which only death can loosen.” The hour in which that tie was to be loosened came very soon. A heart-broken letter from Mrs. Colton told Laurence that he was a free man. “She spoke of you a few minutes before her death,” wrote Emily Jerningham’s aunt. “‘Tell him that one of my last prayers was for his future happiness,’ she said. She suffered much in the last week; but the last day was very peaceful. I can never tell you all her thoughtfulness for others--for you, for me, for Lucy Alford, for her servants, the few poor people at Hampton of whom she knew anything. Her long illness worked a great change in her--a holy and blessed change. Generous, affectionate, and noble-minded she had always been; but the piety of her closing hours was more than I should have dared to hope, remembering her somewhat careless way of thinking when she was in health. In death she is lovelier than in life; there is a divine smile upon her face now which I never saw before. I have received instructions from Mr. Jerningham. My beloved niece is to be buried in the family vault in Berkshire. Oh, Mr. Desmond! what a mournful homeward voyage lies before me! I know not how I am to endure the rest of my life without my more than daughter!” Laurence Desmond’s tears fell fast upon the letter. The old familiar vision of the little garden at Passy, the proud, young face, the slim, white-robed figure, came back to him; and he recalled one summer afternoon, when his lips had almost shaped themselves into the portentous question, and he had restrained himself with an effort, remembering what his mentors of the smoking-room had said about the impossibility of marriage amongst a civilized community without a due provision for the indispensabilities of civilized existence. “This comes of planning one’s life by the ethics of the club-house!” he said to himself, bitterly. CHAPTER XI. HIDDEN HOPES. UPON Mr. Jerningham the tidings of his wife’s death came suddenly, but not unexpectedly. He hastened to arrange that all honour should be paid to the ashes of this fair scion of the house of Jerningham. The ponderous doors of the vault which had not been opened since his father’s death unclosed to receive his wife’s coffin. The bells which had rung a merry peal of welcome when she first came to Greenlands tolled long and dismally upon the day of her burial. All deference and ceremony that could have attended the burial of a beloved wife attended the funeral rites of her who had been only tolerated by her husband. Harold Jerningham was chief mourner at that stately, yet quiet ceremonial. His own hand had addressed the invitation that summoned Laurence Desmond to the funeral.