"Reginald," she whispered, "I have nothing to forgive, but," she added through her sobs, "there is something I must tell you." "I know it, Georgie. I have known it all along. Kiss me, dear," he added with an effort, and with the kiss his spirit passed away. Reginald Haggard was dead, stricken down ere he could succeed to the title and estates which would have been his in the ordinary course of nature; but as the aged earl turned away from the body of the man who had been his heir, his eye fell upon the two young men, and motioning to Lucius he said in a broken voice, "Give me your arm, boy; you're all I have left in the world now." All sign of grief left Lucius Haggard's face at this public notification of his change of position. He drew himself up proudly, and deferentially led the old man away. But young George Haggard didn't hear the words; he stood staring at his dead father, like a man in a dream. "Is there no hope?" he said to those who crowded round the hurdle upon which the body lay. The ominous tick of the falling blood had ceased now, and as if in answer to the young fellow's question, the dead man's jaw fell, disclosing the white teeth. Then George Haggard turned to his mother, and at a sign from Spunyarn he led her from the spot. As soon as Mrs. Haggard found herself alone, she gave way to her natural grief. The hero of her girlish dreams had been snatched from her suddenly, so suddenly that she could hardly realize that he was actually gone from her for ever. She had continued to idolize the man and to remain unaware of his many deficiencies and failings, from the very moment he had first courted her in the rose garden at King's Warren until his death. He had been a fairly good husband to her, as husbands go, and she had never ceased to love him with a trusting affection. But bewildered as she was by the suddenness of her affliction, she could not help pondering over the strange communication he had made to her upon his death-bed. "_I have known it all along!_" What had he known all along? Had he known that Lucius, instead of being his own son was but the bastard child of Lucy Warrender? Surely not. What could he mean, if he had known it all along, by his solemn adjuration to old Lord Pit Town to take care of Lucius. There could be but one interpretation to that, surely that he looked upon the boy as his eldest son, his heir, his first-born child. Why had her husband asked her to forgive him on his death-bed? Forgive him what? He had not bade good-bye to either of the young fellows, but then death had probably come upon him unawares. Could it possibly be that her dead husband, man of the world as he was, could have deliberately, for the mere sake of her cousin's honour, sacrificed the future of his only son designedly, and without that son's consent? That supposition was beyond even Georgina Haggard's credulity.