Death, and not marriage, wipes out offences, clears scores, and opens the bolts and bars of shut hearts a little, for a brief space. Harry Stanhope’s relations mostly wrote to condole with the young widower on the death of the wife whom they had never countenanced. Lord Mount Mallow—after all, only a connection by marriage, who happened to be then disporting himself in the playground of Europe, actually offered to defer climbing a mountain and come out of his way to grace Fan’s funeral. Agneta Amyott wrote impulsively, instead of penning a letter in which, while the proprieties were well preserved, the writer committed herself to nothing. She was deeply grieved, not merely for her dear old Harry, but for her dear sister, her former kind friend, whom Agneta declared she would now give half the world to be able to see, if but once again. And what about the darling little baby? What could three young men make of such a charge? It was deplorable to think of it. Would Harry let her send a trustworthy person to fetch the baby, now that she had a home of her own to receive it in? There were the little Amyotts’ nurse and nurseries all ready. She had not been able to speak to her husband yet, but she felt certain Mr. Amyott would not object. To be sure, the close of Agneta’s letter, in which there was the first note of hesitation, sounded more natural than the beginning. Harry rejected each overture not so much bitterly or pettishly, as with the first sternness and obduracy which had ever burst up through his constitutional softness and irrepressible buoyancy. ‘Nobody shall mourn for Fan but the real mourners—you, Horry, and Constable and me. ‘Fan’s baby shall not be taken out of charity into the house of any man—or woman either. She shall not be brought up as we were, if I can help it.’ Fan’s baby succeeded to what was left of her mother’s little fortune; she might also have the reversion of what Harry and Horace could keep of their legacy. In the meantime she was not given over to the tender mercies of three ignorant men, though, even if she had, she might have fared worse. There was not a woman, high or low, in the Swiss hotel in which she had been born, who was not interested in the small specimen of humanity, and there was one woman—a hard-working clergyman’s hard-working wife, loitering and rather pining abroad while doing her best to get rid of the lagging, idle weeks of her husband’s necessary holiday—who pounced upon the motherless baby as a windfall, or rather, as she would have called it, a Godsend.