"My child," she said, stretching out her soft old hand, and laying it on the cold clenched one, "a death even of what is dearest to us, and a funeral and a headstone to mark the place, hard as it is, is as nothing compared to the death in life of an existence which is always dragging about a corpse. I have seen that not once nor twice. I want to save you from that." Di laid her face for a moment on the kind hand. "I will bury my dead," she said. CHAPTER X. "And now we believe in evil Where once we believed in good. The world, the flesh, and the devil Are easily understood." GORDON. It seems a pity that our human destinies are too often so constituted that with our own hands we may annul in one hour--our hour of weakness--the long, slow work of our strength; annul the self-conquest and the renunciation of our best years. We ought to be thankful when the gate of the irrevocable closes behind us, and the power to defeat ourselves is at last taken from us. For he who has once solemnly and with conviction renounced, and then, for no new cause, has taken to himself again that which he renounced, has broken the mainspring of his life. John went early the following morning to London, for he had business with three men, and he could not rest till he had seen them, and had shut that gate upon himself for ever. So early had he started that it was barely midday when he reached Lord Frederick's chambers. The valet told him that his lordship was still in bed, and could see no one; but John went up to his bedroom, and knocked at the door. "It is I--John Tempest," he said, and went in. Lord Frederick was sitting up in bed, sallow and shrunk like a mummy, in a blue watered-silk dressing-gown. His thin hair was brushed up into a crest on the top of his head. The bed was littered with newspapers and letters. There was a tray before him, and he was in the act of chipping an egg as John came in. He raised his eyebrows and looked first with surprised displeasure, and then with attention, at his visitor. "Good morning," he said; and he went on tapping his egg. "Ah," he said, shaking his head, "hard-boiled again!" John looked at him as a plague-stricken man might look at the carcase of some obscene animal found rotting in his water-spring. Lord Frederick's varied experiences had made him familiar with the premonitory symptoms of those outbursts of anger and distress which he designated under the all-embracing term of "scenes." He felt idly curious to know what this man with his fierce white face had to say to him. "Oblige me by sitting down," he said; "you are in my light." "I have been reading my mother's letters to you," said John, still standing in the middle of the room, and stammering in his speech. He had not reckoned for the blind paroxysm of rage which had sprung up at the mere sight of Lord Frederick, and was spinning him like a leaf in a whirlwind.