Wilmot coloured deeply and angrily under his brother physician's searching gaze. He had not looked for his wife's infrequent letters with any anxiety; he had had no quick, love-inspired apprehension to be assuaged by her womanly considerateness. He felt an uneasy sort of gladness that she had thought he had had such apprehension--better so, even now, when all mistakes were doomed to be everlasting,--or when they were quite cleared up. Which was it? He did not know; he did not like to think. All was over; all was too late. "I never received any such letter," he said again; "and I am astonished you did not write again when you got no answer." "I did not write again, because Mrs. Wilmot gave me so very decidedly to understand that you had told her you could not, under any circumstances, leave Kilsyth; and danger was not imminent until Monday, when I telegraphed, just too late to catch you." No more was said upon the point; but on Wilmot's mind was left a painful and disagreeable impression that Dr. Whittaker had received his explanation with distrust. The colloquy between the two physicians lasted long; and Wilmot was further engaged for a long time in giving the necessary attention to the distressing details which claim a hearing just at the time when they most disturb and jar with the tone of feeling. A sense of shock and hurry--a difficulty of realising the event which had occurred, quite other than the stunned feeling of conviction which had come with the first reception of the intelligence--beset him, while the nameless evidences of death were constantly pressed upon his attention. He sat in his consulting-room, receiving messages and communications of every kind, hearing the subdued voices of the servants as they replied to inquiries, feeling as though he were living through a terrible feverish dream, conscious of all around him, and yet strangely, awfully conscious too of the dead white face upstairs growing, as he knew, more stiff and stark and awful as the hours, so crowded yet so lonely, so busy yet so dreary, flew, no, dragged--which was it?--along. Many times that day, as Chudleigh Wilmot sat cold and grave, and, although deeply sad, more composed, more like himself than most men would have been in similar circumstances--a vision rose before his mind. It was a vision such as has come to many a mourner--a vision of what might have been. For it was not only his wife's death that the new-made widower had learned that day; he had learned that which had made her death doubly sad, far more untimely. The vision Chudleigh saw in his day-dream was of a fair young mother and her child, a happy wife in the summer-time of her beauty and her pride of motherhood--this was what might have been. What was, was a dead white face upstairs upon the bed, waiting for the coffin and the grave, and a blighted hope, a promise never to be fulfilled, which had never even been whispered between the living and the dead.