"Gertrude!" Delia called, in her anguish, as she knelt beside the charred frame, over which France who was kneeling on the other side had thrown his coat. The dark eyes opened in the blackened face, the scorched lips unlocked. A shudder ran through the dying frame. "The child!--the child!" And with that cry to heaven,--that protesting cry of an amazed and conquered soul--Gertrude Marvell passed away. * * * * * Thus ended the First Act of Delia's life. When three weeks later, after a marriage at which no one was present except the persons to be married, Lady Tonbridge, and Dr. France, Winnington took his wife far from these scenes to lands of summer and of rest, he carried with him a Delia ineffaceably marked by this tragedy of her youth. Children, as they come, will sometime re-kindle the natural joy in a face so lovely. And till that time arrives Winnington's tenderness will be the master-light of all her day. But there are sounds once heard that live for ever in the mind. And in Delia's there will reverberate till death that wail of a fierce and childless woman--that last cry of nature in one who had defied nature--of womanhood in one who had renounced the ways of womanhood: "_the child--the child_!" Not long after the destruction of Monk Lawrence and the marriage of Delia, Paul Lathrop left the Maumsey neighbourhood. His debts had been paid by some unknown friend or friends, and he fell back into London literary life, where he maintained a precarious but--to himself--not unpleasant existence. Miss Jackson, the science-mistress, went to Vancouver, married the owner of a lumber camp, and so tamed her soul. Miss Toogood lived on, rarely employed, and seldom going outside the tiny back parlour, with its pictures of Winchester and Mr. Keble. But Lady Tonbridge and Delia do their best to lighten the mild melancholy which grows upon her with age; and a little red-haired niece who came to live with her, keeps her old aunt's nerves alive and alert by various harmless vices--among them an incorrigible interest in the Maumsey and Latchford youth. Marion Andrews and Eliza Daunt disappeared together. They were not captured on that terrible night when Gertrude Marvell, convinced that she could not escape, and perhaps not much caring to escape, came back to look on the ruin she had so long and carefully prepared, and perished in the heart of it--not alone.