When they looked again at their prisoner he was lying nearly on his face, in a profound sleep, his chin on his chest. "Choice stuff--smell o' nuts in it," said constable Ruddle, licking his lips. "Git up, sir; ye can take a nap when you git there." There was a little phial in the old man's fingers; the smell of kernels was stronger about the pillow. "The old man of the mountains" was in a deep sleep, the deepest of all sleeps--death. CHAPTER XXII. CONCLUSION. AND now all things with which, in these pages, we are concerned, are come to that point at which they are best settled in a very few words. The _one_ point required to establish Sedley's claim to the peerage--the validity of the marriage--had been supplied by old Arthur Verney, as we have seen, the night before his death. The late Lord Verney of unscrupulous memory, Arthur's father, had, it was believed, induced Captain Sedley, in whose charge the infant had been placed, to pretend its death, and send the child in reality to France, where it had been nursed and brought up as his. He was dependent for his means of existence upon his employment as manager of his estates, under Lord Verney; and he dared not, it was thought, from some brief expressions in a troubled letter among the papers placed by old Mrs. Mervyn in Wynne Williams's hands, notwithstanding many qualms of conscience, disobey Lord Verney. And he was quieted further by the solemn assurance that the question of the validity of the pretended marriage had been thoroughly sifted, and that it was proved to have been a nullity. He carefully kept, however, such papers as were in his possession respecting the identity of the child, and added a short statement of his own. If that old Lord Verney had suspected the truth that the marriage was valid, as it afterwards proved, he was the only member of his family who did so. The rest had believed honestly the story that it was fraudulent and illusory. The apparent proof of the child's death had put an end to all interest in further investigating the question, and so the matter rested, until time and events brought all to light. The dream that made Malory beautiful in my eyes is over. The image of that young fair face--the beautiful lady of the chestnut hair and great hazel eyes haunts its dark woods less palpably, and the glowing shadow fades, year by year, away. In sunny Italy, where her mother was born, those eyes having looked their last on Cleve and on "the boy," and up, in clouded hope to heaven--were closed, and the slender bones repose. "I think, Cleve, you'll sometimes remember your poor Margaret. I know you'll always be very kind to the little boy--_our_ darling, and if you marry again, Cleve, _she'll_ not be a trouble to you, as I have been; and you said, you'll sometimes think of me. You'll forget all my jealousy, and temper, and folly, and you'll say--'Ah, she loved me.'"