Now he would not seek to palliate his fault or justify himself. He would not remember the jealousy, the violence, the acrimony with which she had driven him to frenzy; he would only remember her strong love for him and his secret indifference to her, and his deeply sympathetic, compassionate and conscientious spirit suffered pangs of remorse that would seem to others morbid, excessive and unjustifiable. On the fifth day following the catastrophe, the remains of Eusebie de Crespigney were placed in an elegant rosewood casket and conveyed by boat to the little Gothic chapel on La Compte’s Landing, where they were met by a small number of old friends and neighbors, and where, after the religious services were over, they were consigned to the family vault under the chancel. Immediately after the funeral, Marcel de Crespigney utterly broke down and fell ill of a brain fever. Dr. Prout, taking authority on himself in the household anarchy, installed Mrs. Lindsay as nurse, and wrote to his family. CHAPTER VI MISS GRIP She is active, stirring, all fire, Cannot rest, cannot tire. BROWNING. Within ten days after the despatch of the doctor’s letter it was answered in person by the colonel’s maiden aunt, who, after many misadventures, reached Promontory Hall in the afternoon of a very bitter cold January day. Miss Agrippina de Crespigney, called by her familiars Miss Grip, was a slight, wiry little woman, with a dark skin, sharp nose and chin, small, keen, brilliant black eyes, tightly curled, bright black hair, and a trim figure, clothed in a close black cashmere gown, with stiff white linen collar and cuffs—a tough little body she was, whose sixty years of life’s hard buffeting had not seemed to have saddened, weakened or in any other way aged, but rather matured, hardened and strengthened. For now, in the very depth of one of the hardest winters that ever was known here, she had undertaken an arduous journey of more than twelve hundred miles, from the green savannahs of the “Sunny South” to the frozen regions of the icy North, traveling without rest, both day and night, by railroads, stage-coaches, and tavern hacks, and at length arrived at her destination, none the worse for her performance, without showing the slightest sign of suffering from cold or from fatigue. The last half-day of her hard week’s journey had been peculiarly trying. She had reached St. Inigoes by stage-coach, early in the morning. After a hasty breakfast she had started in the springless carryall belonging to the inn, for the Promontory. When she reached the shore she had to wait hours there for the tide to ebb before she could cross over the neck of land that connected the island cape to the main. Even then the passage was difficult and dangerous from the piled up blocks of ice that lay across the road.