“I suppose it would be against all decorum to sit down to dinner without him?” said Lord --------. “Why, really, I fear so,” returned Mauleverer. “But our health--our health is at stake; we will only wait five minutes more. By Jove, there's the carriage! I beg your pardon for my heathen oath, my lord bishop.” “I forgive you!” said the good bishop, smiling. The party thus engaged in colloquy were stationed at a window opening on the gravel road, along which the judge's carriage was now seen rapidly approaching; this window was but a few yards from the porch, and had been partially opened for the better reconnoitring the approach of the expected guest. “He keeps the blinds down still! Absence of mind, or shame at unpunctuality,--which is the cause, Mauleverer?” said one of the party. “Not shame, I fear!” answered Mauleverer. “Even the indecent immorality of delaying our dinner could scarcely bring a blush to the parchment skin of my learned friend.” Here the carriage stopped at the porch; the carriage door was opened. “There seems a strange delay,” said Mauleverer, peevishly. “Why does not he get out?” As he spoke, a murmur among the attendants, who appeared somewhat strangely to crowd around the carriage, smote the ears of the party. “What do they say,--what?” said Mauleverer, putting his hand to his ear. The bishop answered hastily; and Mauleverer, as he heard the reply, forgot for once his susceptibility to cold, and hurried out to the carriage door. His guests followed. They found Brandon leaning against the farther corner of the carriage,--a corpse. One hand held the check-string, as if he had endeavoured involuntarily but ineffectually to pull it. The right side of his face was partially distorted, as by convulsion or paralysis; but not sufficiently so to destroy that remarkable expression of loftiness and severity which had characterized the features in life. At the same time the distortion which had drawn up on one side the muscles of the mouth had deepened into a startling broadness the half sneer of derision that usually lurked around the lower part of his face. Thus unwitnessed and abrupt had been the disunion of the clay and spirit of a man who, if he passed through life a bold, scheming, stubborn, unwavering hypocrite, was not without something high even amidst his baseness, his selfishness, and his vices; who seemed less to have loved sin than by some strange perversion of reason to have disdained virtue, and who, by a solemn and awful suddenness of fate (for who shall venture to indicate the judgment of the arch and unseen Providence, even when it appears to mortal eye the least obscured?), won the dreams, the objects, the triumphs of hope, to be blasted by them at the moment of acquisition! CHAPTER XXXVI. AND LAST.