The weeks became months, and the heart of the strangely-widowed wife grew sick and heavy as lead with hopeless waiting, watching, and agonising yearning--dead even to the speculations of those around her, to whom the absence of her husband seemed, of course, most unaccountable, if not unkind and cruel. But for the sake of her child she wished that she might die when it saw the light. Surely, then, Philip would forgive her when he saw its little face, and she was laid within the vault, the mildewed and rusted door of which she had regarded with a shudder on her marriage morning--the vault where all the dead Daubenys lay. So in the fulness of time her baby was born--a little fairy boy--and her father named it Philip, for him who was still so strangely absent, and hot and burning were the tears with which Laura bedewed its tiny face as it nestled in her bosom; and amid the new emotions awakened by maternity she prayed God to forgive her for having longed to die; for no baby in the world could be like hers, that lay so round and soft and warm in her white bosom, and was fast growing so like papa! But where was he wandering? Why was he not with her? Surely he would return _now_? Yet the days still rolled monotonously on, and winter drew nigh. The trees in Craybourne Chase were leafless; the fern, amid which the deer made their lair, was turning red, and the uplands became powdered with snow. "To what a dreary and dreadful Christmas do I look forward, papa!" she exclaimed to the sorrowing old Vicar, "and I do so love him! Philip, Philip, come back to me, and do not leave me thus to die!" she would wail, ever and anon, in her helplessness. And now there came a day which she was fated never, never to forget! Her husband's firm friend and old comrade, who had been his groomsman, the stout-hearted and gallant Charlie Fane, arrived at Craybourne with a face as white as the snow in the Weald of Kent--the bearer of terrible tidings, which he had heard that morning at the club, and these he had to break--he knew not _how_--to Laura, though they had been broken abruptly enough to himself. Jack Westbrook had raised his head from the morning paper just as Fane entered the room, "By Jove! look here, Charlie!" exclaimed Westbrook in an excited tone, "there has been a dreadful accident to the train between Paris and Calais, and among the killed--mangled out of all shape--the report says, is Colonel Philip Daubeny, a British officer. His card-case was found in his pocket." "My God! Poor Laura, poor Phil!" exclaimed Fane, as he took the paper in his trembling hands, and in ten minutes after was _en route_ for Craybourne Hall. "Poor devil!" thought Westbrook, as he lit a cigar; "who knows but I may get the reversion of the widow, with her tin, after all?" CHAPTER V.