The newspaper? Ah!--the _Herald_!--lying as though, after reading it, Ferrier had thrown it down and let the letter drop upon it, from a hand that had ceased to obey him. As Marsham saw it the color rushed into his cheeks. He stooped and raised it. Suddenly he noticed on the margin of the paper a pencilled line, faint and wavering, like the words written on the envelope. It ran beside a passage in the article "from a correspondent," and as he looked at it consciousness and pulse paused in dismay. There, under his eye, in that dim mark, was the last word and sign of John Ferrier. He was still staring at it when a sound disturbed him. Lady Lucy came to him, feebly, across the grass. Marsham dropped the newspaper, retaining Broadstone's letter. "Sir James wished me to leave him a little," she said, brokenly. "The ambulance will be here directly. They will take him to Lytchett. I thought it should have been Tallyn. But Sir James decided it." "Mother!"--Marsham moved toward her, reluctantly--"here is a letter--no doubt of importance. And--it is addressed to you." Lady Lucy gave a little cry. She looked at the pencilled address, with quivering lips; then she opened the envelope, and on the back of the closely written letter she saw at once Ferrier's last words to her. Marsham, moved by a son's natural impulse, stooped and kissed her hair. He drew a chair forward, and she sank into it with the letter. While she was reading it he raised the _Herald_ again, unobserved, folded it up hurriedly, and put it in his pocket; then walked away a few steps, that he might leave his mother to her grief. Presently Lady Lucy called him. "Oliver!" The voice was strong. He went back to her and she received him with sparkling eyes, her hand on Broadstone's letter. "Oliver, this is what killed him! Lord Broadstone must bear the responsibility."