"No, sir," said Susan; "and I can't think where it can have got to. Missus hasn't wore it, sir, not this fortnight; and I have looked everywhere for it. You'll find all her things quite right, sir, except that ring; and Mrs. Prendergast, she knows nothing about it neither; for I called her my own self to take off missus's wedding-ring, as it was missus's own wish as she should do it, and she missed the seal-ring there and then, sir, and couldn't account for it no more than me." "Very well, Susan, it can't be helped," replied Wilmot; and Susan again left him. He sat long, looking at the golden circlet as it lay in the broad palm of his hand. It had never meant so much to him before; and even yet he was far from knowing all it had meant to her from whose dead hand it had been taken. At last, and with some difficulty, he placed the ring upon the little finger of his left hand, saying as he did so, "I must find the other, and always wear them both." CHAPTER XII. The Leaden Seal. When Chudleigh Wilmot arose on the following morning, with the semi-stupefied feeling of a man on whom a great calamity has just fallen, not the least painful portion of the task, not the least difficult part of the endurance that lay before him was the inevitable interview with his dead wife's friend. Mrs. Prendergast had requested that he would receive her early. This he learned from the servant who answered his bell; and he had directed that she should be admitted as soon as she arrived. He loitered about his room; he dallied with the time; he dared not face the cold silent house, the servants, who looked at him with natural curiosity, and, as he thought, avoidance. If the case had not been his own, Wilmot would have remembered that the spectacle of a new-made widow or widower always has attractions for the curiosity of the vulgar: strong, if the grief in the case be very violent; and stronger, if it be mild or non-existent. Wilmot was awfully shocked by his wife's death, terribly remorseful for his own absence, and perhaps for another reason--at which, however, he had not yet had the hardihood to look--almost stunned by the terrible sense, the conviction of the irrevocable ill of the past, the utterly irreparable nature of the wrong that had been done. But all these warring feelings did not constitute grief. Its supreme agony, its utter sadness, its unspeakable weariness were wanting in the strife which shook and rent him. The thought of the dead face had terror and regret for him; but not the dreadful yearning of separation, not the mysterious wrenching asunder of body and spirit, almost as powerful as that of death itself, which comes with the sentence of parting, which makes the possibility of living on so incomprehensible and so cruel to the true mourner. Not the fact itself, so much as the attendant circumstances, caused Wilmot to suffer, as he undoubtedly did suffer. He knew in his heart that had there been no self-reproach involved in