Another telegram to the house-steward ordered a close carriage to be in attendance at Wareham Station at ten o’clock on Sunday morning. “How quietly you bear it, James,” his wife told Lord Cheriton, wonderingly, when the mode of their return had been arranged, and her maid was packing her trunks, with those soberly handsome gowns which had been the wonder of many a butterfly Parisienne. She called him by his Christian name now as in their earliest years of wedded life. It was only on ceremonious occasions, and when the eye of society was upon her, that she addressed him by his title. That stern quietude of his, the fine features set and rigid, frightened her more than a loquacious grief would have done. And yet she hardly knew whether he felt the calamity too much for words; or whether he did not feel it enough. “Poor Godfrey,” she sighed, “he was so good to me—all that a son could have been—murdered! My God! my God! how horrible. If it had been any other kind of death one might bear it—and yet that _he_ should die at all would be too dreadful. So young, so handsome—cut off in the flower of his days! And she loved him so. She has loved him all her life. What will become of her without him?” “What will become of her?” that was the mother’s moaning cry all through that dreary day. Lord Cheriton paced the sands as far as he could go from that giddy multitude in front of the sea wall—beyond the little rocky ridge by the pleasant Hôtel des Bains, where the young mothers, and nurses, and children, and homely, easy-going visitors congregate—away towards Cancale, where all was loneliness. He walked up and down, meditating upon his blighted hopes. He knew now that he had loved this young man almost as well as he loved his own daughter, and that his death had shattered as fair a fabric as ever ambition built on the further side of the grave. “She will go in mourning for him all the days of my life, perhaps,” he thought, “and then some day after I am in my grave she will fall in love with an adventurer, and the estate I love and the fortune I have saved will be squandered on the Turf or thrown away at Monte Carlo.” A grim smile curled his lip at a grim thought, as he paced that lonely shore beyond the jutting cliff and the villa on the point. “I am sorry I left the Bench when I did,” he thought; “it would have been something to have put on the black cap and passed sentence upon that poor lad’s murderer.” Who was his murderer, and what the motive of the crime? Those were questions which Lord Cheriton had been asking himself with maddening iteration through that intolerable summer day. He welcomed the fading sunlight of late afternoon. He could eat nothing; would not even sit down to make a pretence of dining; but waited chafing in the great stone hall of the hotel for the carriage that was to take him and his wife to the steamer. CHAPTER VIII. “The stars move still, Time runs, the clock will strike.”