"I know." Miss Chressham put her aside and rose. "They are showing him for money," she said, in a tone of uncontrolled agony. "My God, how can one bear it?" "You--you could do nothing?" Susannah answered fiercely. "Why do you ask me that, Selina? Do you think that I have not tried? And he has friends; but my lord's dead face was one of my lord's best assets, and there is not a woman in London hath not been to see him--paying gold for it." "Ah, forgive me!" said Miss Boyle, in a broken voice. "I have been forgetting what it is to you--you who are of his house; and you were fond of him." "Yes, I was fond of him," answered Susannah, with a short laugh, "but I could not spare him this. What are they, these men who make their profit of the dead?" Miss Boyle rose. "I must go," she said feverishly. "Would you forsake him, Susannah, because he hath strangers about him? When so many look on him for curiosity, shall not some look on him for love? I must go, if it kills me." Susannah gazed at her questioningly. "Could you bear it?" "I could not bear to stay away," answered Miss Boyle, raising her wan face. "And my lady--hath my lady been?" "No." Susannah clenched her hands. "To-morrow they give him a fine funeral, a spectacle for the town; and then my lady will go to ride in the pageant, and weep at the window of her coach." "You speak bitterly." "God forgive me, I have no right; but I do not think that she loved him. It was always Marius." Selina picked up her hat. "I am going," she said. "And you----" Their eyes met. "I will come." "At once," whispered Miss Boyle. "Yes; I will fetch my cloak." She went softly into the bedchamber, closing the door after her, and Selina stood leaning against the mantelpiece, fastening her pelisse over her grey dress. It had been a cloudy day, but now the sun was shining fitfully through the long window on to the worn furniture and dark walls. A straight beam fell across a row of prints in black frames that hung opposite. Miss Boyle raised her eyes and looked at them. The title, engraved finely beneath each subject, seemed to start out and be written on the sunlight: "THE RAKE'S PROGRESS." Mr. Hogarth's terrible pictures; she had seen them and shuddered over them before. "The Rake's Progress." "Susannah!" she cried on a sobbing breath. Miss Chressham entered from the bedchamber. "Hush! my lady sleeps." "Susannah, those pictures; can you live with them?" "My lord did not live to reach that final scene," answered Susannah; "so, they do not frighten me but make me thankful." She glanced at that last plate with its Bedlam horrors, then again at Selina. "My dear, you look ill," she said, a little wildly. "Can you face it?" "Yes, ah, yes; I am ready." She picked up her gloves, and they left the room and house.