Yet to her whom his going or staying most concerns, how beyond all words less terrible is this real death of the young man than the counterfeit one of seven weeks ago! Seven weeks ago he would have departed in relentless silence, unpursuable through the infinities of eternity by any agony of prayer or pleading, leaving behind him a wretched woman with her debt for ever uncancelled, with the hounds of remorse for ever on her track. Whereas now, as Susan has already learnt from her to whom by his graceful dying he has renounced all claim, he has departed in magnanimous reconcilement, and selfless forethought for that future of hers in which he will have no share. Yes; it has been well done of him thus to die, tactful, like himself! She articulates the word under her breath, and, hearing them, catches herself up, aghast at the drift of her own musings. Is it possible that she can have allowed a little satisfaction in such a calamity to creep into her mind? a little furtive thankfulness at her friend’s release from the meshes of that terrible net which the fowler Fate had spread for her? Has she--she herself--no pity for the old man, who, as all the parish now knows, has the hand of Death--though a temporarily suspended hand--upon him? The old man out of whose weak grasp the staff has been ruthlessly knocked, before the few more steps during which he would have asked its support, have been paced? Has she no pity for the young man himself, mulcted of five and forty of his seventy due years, juggled out of bride and hearth, pitchforked into the unknown? Rupert had always gone to the wall. What a willing hand she herself had until lately--once again she thanks God that there is a “till lately”--lent to thrust and keep him there! Rupert has once more gone to the wall! Rupert is “out of the way!” Never in his lifetime would he have willingly been in it; but now he is finally “out of the way!” CHAPTER XXIV “It was the winter wild, While the heaven-born child, All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies; Nature, in awe to him, Had doffed her gaudy trim, With her great Matter so to sympathies: It was no season then for her To wanton with the Sun her lusty paramour.” No one can qualify by the epithet “wild” the Christmas that follows Rupert Campion’s death. It comes simpering in with a faded grey smile, swishy soft gusts, and a mock-April taste; and the Darcy family are conscious of no sting or frost-prick in cheek or finger as they stand silently round the new cross that heads Rupert’s grave, and to whose final erection the workmen gave their last touches only two hours ago. For Rupert has elected to lie in the open, having notified his wish in a small memorandum, placed where it was certain to be found; and which proves that him at least the ambushed enemy had not surprised by his spring.