The carriage drove off, and Gustave de Tournefort stood still outside the door of Lord Forestfield's house, like a man in a bad dream. He had kept his word. He had fulfilled the pact which he had made with his own sense of honour. The interval had expired between the Decree Nisi and the Decree Absolute; and De Tournefort, who knew nothing of what had occurred during that interval, had returned to England, with the intention of again offering to May the reparation of marriage. He had sought her at Podbury-street, and there learned from Mrs. Wilson the fact, which that good woman had read, with sincere regret, in the newspapers. An irresistible impulse drove De Tournefort to look upon the house whence May had been expelled for him, to which she had so inexplicably returned. And so the two men who had been her ruin--which of the two was the more guilty in the matter, who shall dare to say?--came together, face to face, ere yet the sun had set upon her grave. The marriage of Sir Nugent Uffington and Eleanor Irvine took the world somewhat by surprise, when it was solemnised in the early spring of the following year. Their engagement had been kept quiet, almost unsuspected by their few common acquaintance, and Mrs. Chadwick had not talked about it. She liked Sir Nugent very much, but she was just a little afraid of him; he puzzled her; as she expressed it, she 'could not make him out;' and she would have thought several times about disobliging him, and then have left it undone. So that when Sir Nugent explained to her that he and Eleanor disliked the _éclat_ of announcements, and hoped she would indulge them by keeping their hopes and projects within the small family circle, she observed his wish; Eleanor's only might not have been so strictly respected. The events which had taken place since Sir Nugent Uffington's appearance on the rapidly expanding stage of Mrs. Chadwick's life had produced a good deal of effect on that lady; had forced her, to perceive that wealth and grandeur might possibly have their seamy side, and had restored her to those sentiments of content with which she had in the first instance accepted the rise in life effected by her marriage. For a while Fanny Chadwick had been in danger of 'spoiling;' she had been tempted to grumble at her husband's want of the superficial elegance on which she had learned to set undue value, to compare him, to his disadvantage, with the fops and fools whom she was proud of collecting in her rooms at Fairfax-gardens. But the experience of the past season did Mrs. Chadwick a world of good; she gathered good fruit out of that miserable business of the Forestfields, as the tragedy of May's life and death was called, while any one remembered either, and she stored it up. She was never really guilty of feeling ashamed of her husband again, and from any approach to such a sentiment she recoiled into being ashamed of herself. It was wonderful how much Mr. Chadwick's