"A Mr. Forde, who has been here to-day, demanding to see Leonora, and who is coming this evening to see you, told Williams he was afraid to meet his creditors. Williams, who has never seen the slightest evidence of shortness of money about this house, inclines to the opinion that Mr. Forde is mad, and I have done my best to confirm that opinion, but Mr. Forde I believe to be right; I am afraid you will find he destroyed himself, because he was a ruined man." There was silence for a minute, broken only by the sound of Dolly's suppressed sobs. "Poor fellow," said Lord Darsham; "he must have suffered horribly before it came to this." "Only those who have gone through such an ordeal can imagine what he must have endured," she answered simply; "depend upon it his heart was broken days before he died." "I never liked Werner," commented her auditor. "I always thought him a self-contained money-worshiping snob, and I never believed, spite of the purple and fine linen, that Leonora was happy in her marriage, but I am sorry for him now. A man who commits suicide must have an enormous capacity for misery, and a man who has an enormous capacity for misery must have had an enormous capacity for something better, had any opportunity for developing it occurred." "You will forget my telegram," she entreated. "I shall say nothing about it, which will amount to much the same thing," he answered. CHAPTER XI. TWO UNWELCOME VISITORS. The business of living goes on all the same let who will retire from active participation in it, and, accordingly, Mrs. Mortomley and Lord Darsham sat down to dinner, although the whilom master of the house lay dead in that small room on the other side the hall, where he had made his exit from this world. But, in truth, that dinner was a very funereal affair. There was a something ghastly in eating of the ruined man's substance; in drinking of the wines he had selected; in occupying the apartment where he must often have sat at table with a guest no one else could see facing him; and the conversation in Williams's presence, compulsorily of no private nature, flagged as conversation did not often flag when Dolly held one of the battledores. With great persuasion Mrs. Werner had been induced to swallow a draught ordered for her by the family physician, and she lay in a sleep as sound and almost as dreamless as that which enfolded the silent figure lying all alone in the twilight of the summer's evening. Thirty hours before, he was alive; and now, his spirit had started on the long, lonesome journey; and through the gloom of the Valley of the Shadow no human eye could follow him. Dolly could not get over the horror of it all; and when Mr. Forde's knock woke the echoes of the house, she started from her seat in an access of terror, and exclaiming, "Oh! let me get upstairs before he comes in," left the room, and ran upstairs to Mrs. Werner's apartment.