his enemies—­I saved him from the ignominy of a public trial—­from the execration of his countrymen.  His only punishment was to eat his heart under this roof, in luxurious seclusion, his comfort studied, his whims gratified so far as they could be by the most faithful of servants.  A light penance for the dark infamies of his life in India, I think.  His mind was all but gone when he came here, but he had his rational intervals, and in these the burden of his lonely life may have weighed heavily upon him.  But it was not such a heavy burden as I have borne—­I, his gaoler, I who have devoted my existence to the one task of guarding the family honour.’

He, whom she thus acknowledged as her husband, had sunk exhausted into a chair near her.  He took out his gold snuff-box, and refreshed himself with a leisurely pinch of snuff, looking about him curiously all the while, with a senile grin.  That flash of passion which for a few minutes had restored him to the full possession of his reason had burnt itself out, and his mind had relapsed into the condition in which it had been when he talked to Mary in the garden.

‘My pipe, Steadman,’ he said, looking towards the door; ’bring me my pipe,’ and then, impatiently, ’What has become of Steadman?  He has been getting inattentive—­very inattentive.’

He got up, and moved slowly to the door, leaning on his crutch-stick, his head sunk upon his breast, muttering to himself as he went; and thus he vanished from them, like the spectre of some terrible ancestor which had returned from the grave to announce the coming of calamity to a doomed race.  His grandson looked after him, with an expression of intense displeasure.

‘And so, Lady Maulevrier,’ he exclaimed, turning to his grandmother, ’I have borne a title that never belonged to me, and enjoyed the possession of another man’s estates all this time, thanks to your pretty little plot.  A very respectable position for your grandson to occupy, upon my life!’

Lord Hartfield lifted his hand with a warning gesture.

‘Spare her,’ he said.  ’She is in no condition to endure your reproaches.’

Spare her—­yes.  Fate had not spared her.  The beautiful face—­beautiful even in age and decay—­changed suddenly as she looked at them—­the mouth became distorted, the eyes fixed:  and then the heavy head fell back upon the pillow—­the paralysed form, wholly paralysed now, lay like a thing of stone.  It never moved again.  Consciousness was blotted out for ever in that moment.  The feeble pulses of heart and brain throbbed with gradually diminishing power for a night and a day; and in the twilight of that dreadful day of nothingness the last glimmer of the light died in the lamp, and Lady Maulevrier and the burden of her sin were beyond the veil.