The little village of Wyndham, near Hawkhurst, the very ideal of a Kentish village, had been mostly owned by Sir Harold Wynde. To him had belonged the row of shops, the old inn with its creaking sign, and most of the neat houses that stood in gardens along the single street. It was Sir Harold who had caused to be built the little new stone church, with its slender spire, and in this church the mourning villagers gathered to listen to the sermon that was preached in commemoration of the baronet’s death. Lady Wynde was not present to listen to this sermon. Her gray companion, attired in deep mourning, with the entire household of Hawkhurst, was there, and the young clergyman made a feeling allusion to “the bereaved young widow, sitting alone in her darkened chamber and weeping for her dead, refusing like Rachel of old, to be comforted.” Many of the kindly women present shed tears at this picture, but Artress smiled behind her double mourning vail. She knew that Lady Wynde was lying upon a sofa in her luxurious sitting-room at Hawkhurst, busy with a French novel, and she knew also that not one tear had dimmed her ladyship’s black eyes since the news had come of Sir Harold’s horrible fate. Neighbors and friends thronged to Hawkhurst to offer their condolences to the young widow. For the first week she was reported inconsolable, and refused to see any one; but a box of the most elegant and fashionable mourning having come down from London, Lady Wynde began to receive her visitors. She affected to be quite broken down by her bereavement, and for weeks did not go out of doors. And when, finally, being urged to take care of her health and to become resigned to her loss, she took morning drives, her equipage looked like a funeral one, her carriage and horses being alike black, and her own face being shrouded in double folds of sombre crape. Artress had written to Sir Harold’s daughter immediately upon the arrival of the news of Sir Harold’s death, but the letter had been cold and practical, and contained merely the terrible announcement, without one line to soften its horror. About a week later, no letter having been received from Neva, Lady Wynde wrote a very pathetic letter, full of protestations of sympathy, and setting forth her own mock sorrow as something genuinely heart-rending, and declaring herself utterly prostrated in both body and mind. Her ladyship offered her condolences to the bereaved daughter, assuring her that henceforth they “must be all the world to each other,” and concluded her letter by the false statement that it had been the late Sir Harold’s wish that his daughter should remain at her Paris school a year longer, and, as the wishes of the dead are sacred, Lady Wynde had sacrificed her own personal feelings in the matter, and had consented that Neva should remain another year “under the care of her excellent French teachers.”