A minute later the nurse knocked at the library-door, having come to communicate the melancholy intelligence to his lordship, who received it with sullen propriety; and the dreary, dreadful bustle which precedes the awful stillness of a house wherein one lies dead, to last until the drearier and more dreadful bustle of the funeral, immediately commenced in that beautiful house in Seamore-place, where May's short life of joy, folly, guilt, repentance, and reparation had been lived. When the night was some hours old, Sir Nugent Uffington, who had passed the interval in walking for miles straight ahead, he did not know where, returned to Seamore-place, and from the opposite side of the roadway looked up at the windows of the room where May Forestfield was lying. The house was invested with the conventional marks of mourning, and the useless tan was littered deep across the street. Lights were burning in the death-room, tall torches which threw their shadows on the blinds, and flickered in the air which passed in at that ominously open uppermost six inches of window-sash. Sir Nugent's imagination was busy with the scene which that room presented. He could see the sweet young face, set in its marble paleness, with the dark-veined eyelids, on which an expression of pain and weariness had sat for so long, sealed over the eyes which were never more to smile as they had smiled so rarely, or weep as they had wept so often, since he had seen them first, and, seeing them, been reminded of her mother's eyes, hidden in the dust. He could see the outline of the graceful wasted limbs, and the waxen hands laid upon the satin coverlet in the fulness of everlasting rest. It was well that she had died there, in her husband's house, with such protection as that formal circumstance might afford her name, that name which meant nothing now, save to the few who loved her, and would so soon be utterly forgotten by those who had been most eager to blacken it with scandal and cover it with reproach; but his heart was full of bitterness as he thought of _why_ she had died. For that worse than worthless creature; for that sensual, cynical, selfish, brutal, dastardly fellow, whose sins against the marriage vow which she had broken had been countless and unblushing, as they were unrebuked and unpunished; who owed the life which had been a curse to her, to his wife's care, and who was set free by her death to carry out any scheme which might enter his base mind. Not yet could Uffington rejoice in her release; not yet could he realise the nothingness to her of what he could not but regard with bitterness and rage as Forestfield's triumph; and when he turned away at last from his contemplation of the silent house, and went home to write to Eleanor, it was with a heart full of hate towards Forestfield and De Tournefort, the two who had to answer for the fate just fulfilled within those walls.