When Lord Forestfield returned to his house in Seamore-place, the dreary stillness which had brooded over it for a week had disappeared. Luggage, prepared for travelling, was in the hall, and a couple of servants in deep mourning were busy with straps, buckles, and rugs. He passed them quickly, and went into the library. Presently a close carriage with posters came to the door, and the men, directed by Stephens, put some of the luggage upon it. Lord Forestfield was going away--going in this unusual style, to avoid the inconvenience of railway travelling--on the very day of his wife's funeral. He could not stay in the house; nothing would have induced him to pass another night there; its profound solitude appalled him, and there was no one whom he could ask to break or share that solitude. Lord Forestfield's friends were not of the sort who are naturally turned to in trouble, whether it be formal or real. He had suffered tortures in that house while his wife lay dead in it, tortures which even Stephens had not guessed at, and which he had utterly failed to deaden with drink. And yet how hard he had tried! In defiance of every warning, of even the physical loathing with which it inspired him, of the inability to drink as he had been accustomed to do, which was a lingering result of the fever, he had swallowed large quantities of wine during the endless hours which he passed alone in that horrible room; hours when he could not make up his mind to go to bed, and could not sleep, and was ashamed to keep his servant with him; hours when the wine, which would formerly have turned him into a drunken madman, only made him more hideously conscious, more horribly wide awake. He was going away; he did not know whether he should ever come back. He might get over this feeling in time; it was not grief; he did not attempt to deceive himself about that. He did not know what it was--only his infernal nerves, no doubt; and if he did get over it, well and good; at present his keenest desire was to get away from that room, and never to see it again. In an hour after Lord Forestfield had reentered his house, he left it again. As he was crossing the footway to his travelling-carriage, a man passed between it and him. A man with a pale face, with a wild look of disturbance in it, and an unsteady step. A man who might be rather mad, or rather drunk, but, being either, had not quite lost his self-control, and who knew Lord Forestfield. A man whom Lord Forestfield knew, for he stepped back, as if from a blow, and stammered out: 'De Tournefort! You!' 'Yes, it is I. Is this _true_? Speak, man! Is it _true_?' 'Is _what_ true?' 'That _she_ is dead?' 'Yes, it is true--she is dead, and buried to-day.' Lord Forestfield stepped past the questioner, and got into the carriage; then he leaned forward, and hissed rather than spoke these words: 'She has escaped _us both_.'