There could be no miracle now for her! Even the thought of that was gone. The man who had made her believe that he loved her, only in the last autumn,--though indeed it seemed to her that years had rolled over since, and made her old, worn-out, and weary;--who had asked for and obtained the one gift she had to give, the bestowal of her very self; who had made her in her baby folly believe that he was almost divine, whereas he was hardly human in his lowness,--this man, whom she still loved in a way which she could not herself understand, loving and despising him utterly at the same time,--was now the husband of another woman. Even he, she had felt, would have thought something of her. But she had been nothing to him but the means of escape from disreputable difficulties. She could not sustain her contempt for herself as she remembered this, and yet she showed but little of it in her outward manner. "I'll go when you like, Papa," she said when the days of May had come, "but I'd sooner stay here a little longer if you wouldn't mind." There was no talk of going home. It was only a question whether they should go further north, to Lucerne, before the warm weather came. "Of course we will remain; why not?" said Sir Harry. "Mamma and I like Lugano amazingly." Poor Sir Harry. As though he could have liked any place except Humblethwaite! Our story is over now. They did remain till the scorching July sun had passed over their heads, and August was upon them; and then--they had buried her in the small Protestant cemetery at Lugano, and Sir Harry Hotspur was without a child and without an heir. He returned home in the early autumn, a grey, worn-out, tottering old man, with large eyes full of sorrow, and a thin mouth that was seldom opened to utter a word. In these days, I think, he recurred to his early sorrow, and thought almost more of his son than of his daughter. But he had instant, pressing energy left to him for one deed. Were he to die now without a further will, Humblethwaite and Scarrowby would go to the wretch who had destroyed him. What was the title to him now, or even the name? His wife's nephew was an Earl with an enormous rent-roll, something so large that Humblethwaite and Scarrowby to him would be little more than additional labour. But to this young man Humblethwaite and Scarrowby were left, and the glories of the House of Hotspur were at an end. And so the story of the House of Humblethwaite has been told. London: R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor Printers Bread Street Hill. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Specific changes in wording of the text are listed below. Chapter V, paragraph 1. The word "of" was deleted from the sentence which in the original read: It was of this taste OF which Pope was conscious when he declared that every woman was at heart a rake.