"Ay, she was proud--I _promised_--proud--she was--very high--it will be in Penruthyn, she told me she would be buried there--Dowager Lady Verney! I wish, sir, it had been I." She drew her cloak about her and left the room, and he accompanied her with the candle to the hall-door, and saw her hurry up the street. Now and then a passenger looked at the tall cloaked figure gliding swiftly by, but no one recognised her. The attorney was gaping after her in deep abstraction, and when she was out of sight he repeated, with a resolute wag of his head-- "I _will_ do my duty by you--and a serious affair, upon _my soul_! A _very_ serious affair it is." And so he closed the door, and returned to his sitting-room in deep thought, and very strange excitement, and continued reading those papers till one o'clock in the morning. CHAPTER XVIII. MR. DINGWELL AND MRS. MERVYN CONVERSE. CLEVE was assiduous in consoling Miss Caroline Oldys, a duty specially imposed upon him by the voluntary absence of Lady Wimbledon, who spent four or five hours every day at Malory, with an equally charitable consideration for the spirits of Lord Verney, who sat complaining in pain and darkness. Every day he saw more or less of the Rev. Isaac Dixie, but never alluded to his midnight interview with him at Clay Rectory. Only once, a little abruptly, he had said to him, as they walked together on the green---- "I say, you must manage your duty for two Sundays more--you _must_ stay here for the funeral--that will be on Tuesday week." Cleve said no more; but he looked at him with a fixed meaning in his eye, with which the clergyman somehow could not parley. At the post-office, to which Miss Oldys had begged his escort, a letter awaited him. His address was traced in the delicate and peculiar hand of that beautiful being who in those very scenes had once filled every hour of his life with dreams, and doubts, and hopes; and now how did he feel as those slender characters met his eye? Shall I say, as the murderer feels when some relic of his buried crime is accidentally turned up before his eyes--chilled with a pain that reaches on to doomsday--with a tremor of madness--with an insufferable disgust? Smiling, he put it with his other letters in his pocket, and felt as if every eye looked on him with suspicion--with dislike; and as if little voices in the air were whispering, "It is from his wife--from his wife--from his wife." Tom Sedley was almost by his side, and had just got his letters--filling him, too, with dismay--posted not ten minutes before from Malory, and smiting his last hope to the centre.