On me this action--hers soothing, protective; his appealing, welcoming--produced the most bewildering effect. I felt embarrassed and abashed; an indecently impertinent intruder upon the secret places of two human hearts. That any such intimate and tender correspondence existed between this so strangely ill-assorted couple I never dreamed. I uttered what must have sounded wildly incoherent farewells and fled. Of the ensuing eighteen months of foreign travel it is irrelevant here to speak. Suffice it that on my return to England and to Chelsea, the earliest news which greeted me was that Arabella Lessingham had been now five weeks married and Heber Pogson a fortnight dead. Lessingham, dear, good fellow, was my informant, and minded acquainting me, so I fancied, only a degree less with the first item than with the second. For some considerable time, he told me, Pogson had been ailing. He grew inordinately stout, unwieldy to the extent of all exertion, all movement causing him distress. Suffocation threatened if he attempted to lie down; so that, latterly, he spent not only all day, but all night sitting in the big library chair we knew so well. If not actually in pain, he must still have suffered intolerable discomfort. But he never complained, and to the last his passion for books never failed. "We took him any new ones we happened to run across, as you'd take a sick woman flowers. To the end he read." "And wrote?" I asked. "That I can't say," Lessingham replied. "There were things I could not make out. And I couldn't question him. It didn't seem to be my place, though I had an idea he'd something on his mind to speak of which would be a relief. It worried me badly. I felt sure he wanted to tell us, but couldn't bring himself to the point. He talked of you. He cared for you more than for any of us; yet--I may be all wrong--it seemed to me he was glad you weren't here. Once or twice, I thought, he felt almost afraid you might come back before--before it was all over, you know. It sounds rather horrible, but I had a feeling he longed to slink off quietly out of sight--for he did not dread death, I'm certain of that. What he dreaded was that life had some trick up her sleeve which, if he delayed too long, might give him away; put him to shame somehow at the last." "And Mrs. Pogson?" Lessingham looked at me absently. "Oh! Mrs. Pogson? She's never interested me. She's too invertebrate; but I believe she took care of Pogson all right."