“I know what I did; but I am different from you,” said Edgar--“you, with your babies. Clare, let us speak; we are not stones--we are men.” “Ah! stones are better than men--less cruel, less terrible!” she cried. “No, no; I cannot bear it. We will go in silence; there is nothing that anyone can say.” “You see,” said Edgar, turning to Arden--“what is my advice or my suggestions now? To speak of compromise or negotiation----” “Compromise!” said Clare, her pale cheek flaming; she rose up with a sudden impulse of insupportable passion--“compromise!--to me!” Then, turning to Edgar, she clutched at his arm, and he felt what force she was putting upon herself, and how she trembled. “Come,” she said, “this air kills me; take me away!” He let her guide him, not daring to oppose her, out to the air--to the door, down the great steps. She faltered more and more at every step she took, then, suddenly stopping, leaned against him. “Let me sit down somewhere. I am growing giddy,” she said. She sat down on the steps, on the very threshold of the home she was quitting, as she thought, for ever. The servants, in a group behind, tried to gaze over their master’s shoulders at this extraordinary scene. Where was she going?--what did she mean? There was a moment during which no one spoke, and Clare, to her double horror, felt her senses forsaking her. Her head swam, the light fluttered in her eyes. A moment more, and she would be conscious of nothing round her. I have said she was not the kind of woman who faints at a great crisis, but the body has its revenges, its moments of supremacy, and she had neither slept nor eaten, neither rested nor forgotten, for all these hours. It was at this moment that the messenger from the “Arden Arms,” a boy, whom no one had noticed coming up the avenue, thrust something into Edgar’s hand. “Be that for you, sir?” said the boy. The sound of this new, strange voice roused everybody. Clare came out of her half-faint, and regained her full sense of what was going on, though she was unable to rise. Arthur Arden came close to them down the steps, with wild eagerness in his eyes. Edgar only would have thrust the paper away which was put into his hands. “Tush!” he said, with the momentary impulse of tossing it from him; then, suddenly catching, as it were, a reflection of something new possible in Arden’s wild look, and even a gleam of some awful sublime of tragic curiosity in the opening eyes of Clare, he looked at the paper itself, which came to him at that moment of fate. It was a telegram, in the vulgar livery which now-a-days the merest trifles and the most terrible events wear alike in England. He tore it open; it was from Mr. Tottenham, dated that morning, and contained these words only:-- “_Miss Lockwood died here at nine o’clock._” Edgar thrust it into Arden’s hand. He felt something like a wild sea surging in his ears; he raised up Clare in his arms, and drew her wondering, resisting, up the great steps.