‘I have come from--Everard Brown. He has thought it best to go away. I have brought you a statement of all the affairs, showing how he has carried with him a certain sum of money. Mrs. Blencarrow, it is too great a shock; let me call someone.’ ‘No!’ She caught at his arm, evidently not knowing what it was upon which she leant. ‘No, tell me all--all!’ ‘He has taken means--I know not what--to destroy all evidence. He has gone away, never meaning to return. It is all wrong--wrong from beginning to end, the money and everything; but he had a generous meaning. He wanted to set you free. He has gone--for ever, Mrs. Blencarrow!’ She had fallen at his feet without a word. * * * * * People said afterwards that they had thought for some time that Mrs. Blencarrow was not looking well, that she was in a state to take any illness. And there was a flaw in the drains which nobody had discovered till then. She had a long illness, and at one time was despaired of. Things were complicated very much by the fact that Brown, her trusted and confidential agent, had just emigrated to Australia, a thing he had long set his heart upon, before she fell ill. But her brother, Mr. Roger d’Eyncourt, was happily able to come to Blencarrow and look after everything, and she recovered finally, being a woman with a fine constitution and in the prime of life. The family went abroad as soon as she was well enough to travel, and have remained so, with intervals of London, ever since. When Reginald comes of age, Blencarrow will no doubt be opened once more; but the care of the estate had evidently become too much for his mother, and it is not thought that she will venture upon such a charge again. It is now in the hands of a regular man of business, which is perhaps better on the whole. Kitty fell into great and well-deserved disgrace when it was found out that she had seen what nobody else could see. Walter even, with a man’s faculty for abandoning his partner in guilt, declared that he never saw it, that Kitty must have dreamt it, that she tried to make him believe it was Joan Blencarrow when it was only Jane Robinson, and many other people were of opinion that it was all Kitty’s cleverness to get herself forgiven and her own runaway match condoned. That match turned out, like most others, neither perfect happiness nor misery. Perhaps neither husband nor wife could have explained ten years after how it was that they were so idiotic as to think that they could not live without each other; but they get on together very comfortably, all the same. THE END. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow, by Margaret Oliphant