The blow Tifford dealt him at the door blotted every antecedent event out of his memory. “Too late, sir,” said that individual, in a low tone to Alick. “It is all over!” “What is over?” Tifford subsequently informed his friends, Mr. Dudley demanded, adding, “And then, poor gentleman, I told him she was gone.” Arthur was precisely the man to feel a shock of this kind keenly; a stronger nature could never have suffered itself to be so deluded; and the servants about the house, the only people who noted his visit to the close shut room, suspected that Mrs. Dudley’s grief was less bitter than his; that her open lamentations, her fast-flowing tears were preferable to this silent sorrow—to this tardy repentance which kept him haunting the death-chamber—dragging him continually away both from business and from rest to look on the face of the child he had only grown to love much when she needed no more love from any human being. It has before been stated, that Arthur Dudley always rated more highly the blessings he lacked than the blessings he enjoyed, and this very peculiarity of his temperament increased the grief which his affection, and his repentance alike were sure to produce when once affection and repentance were useless. Never before in his life had Arthur Dudley felt so lonely and so miserable as during the week which succeeded Lally’s death. For some time previously he had been gradually estranging himself from every member of his family, and now there was a restraint evident in their manner towards him—a restraint and an awkwardness which neither he nor they, knew exactly how to overcome. In those days even Heather grew hard, and would not of her own free will speak to him as she did to others about their child, whom he had, as she fancied, neglected. “She was mine,” the poor mother repeated, when Bessie would fain have had her talk to Arthur of Lally, “she was mine, and mine only; he never cared for her. Even strangers—even Mr. Croft and Mr. Stewart, and Mr. Henry—were kinder to my darling than her own father. No, Bessie, I am not unfeeling—it is the truth. He was never with me nor with her; always with that wicked, cruel woman—always—always.” It is a curious anomaly to notice how harsh the very excess of a woman’s sensibility frequently renders her. She feels one side of a question so deeply, that there is no room left in her nature for considering even the possibility of there being another side at all. And, in that hour of mortal sorrow, Heather had no leisure to bestow a thought on any one except her dead child. Even her love for Arthur seemed blotted out in indignation at his neglect of their first-born. And yet the iron had entered very deep into the man’s soul—so deep, that the day when he followed Lally to her last resting-place was perhaps the bitterest of his life. They buried her at Fifield. Not so very far from the old home—under the shadow of the grey church-tower—they laid Heather’s darling down to sleep.