“When old Mackaye’s will was read, he had left L400 he’d saved, to be parted between you and me, on condition that we’d go and cool down across the Atlantic, and if it hadn’t been for your illness, I’d have been in Texas now.”

Often did I see Eleanor in those days of convalescence, but it was not till a month had gone by that I summoned courage to ask after my cousin.  Eleanor looked solemnly at me.

“Did you not know it?  He is dead—­of typhus fever.  He died three weeks ago; and not only he, but the servant who brushed his clothes, and the shopman who had a few days before brought him a new coat home.”

“How did you learn all this?”

“From Mr. Crossthwaite, who found out that you most probably caught your fever from a house near Blackfriars, and in that house this very coat had been turned out, and had covered a body dead of typhus.”

Half unconscious, I stammered Lillian’s name inquiringly.

“She is much changed; sorrow and sickness—­for she, too, has had the fever—­have worn her down.  Little remains now of that loveliness——­”

“Which I idolised in my folly.”

“I tried to turn you from your dream.  I knew there was nothing there for your heart to rest upon.  I was even angry with you for being the protege of anyone but myself.”

* * * * *

Eleanor bade me go, and I obeyed her, and sailed—­and here I am.  And she bade me write faithfully the story of my life, and I have done so.

Yes, I have seen the land!  Like a purple fringe upon the golden sea.  But I shall never reach the land.  Weaker and weaker, day by day, with bleeding lungs and failing limbs, I have travelled the ocean paths.  The iron has entered too deeply into my soul.

* * * * *

This is an extract from a letter by John Crossthwaite.

“Galveston, Texas, October, 1848.

“And now for my poor friend, whose papers, according to my promise to him, I transmit to you.  On the very night on which he seems to have concluded them—­an hour after we had made the land—­we found him in his cabin, dead, resting peacefully as if he had slumbered.”

* * * * *

Hereward the Wake

With, the appearance of “Hereward the Wake,” sometimes called “Hereward, the Last of the English,” Kingsley brought to a close a remarkable series of works of fiction.  Although the story was not published until 1866, the germ of it came to Kingsley, according to Mrs. Kingsley’s “Memoirs” of her husband, during the summer of 1848, while on a visit to Crowland Abbey, near Peterborough, with the Rev. F.D.  Maurice.  As its title implies, the romance is suggested by the life and adventures of Hereward, a Saxon yeoman who flourished about 1070.  The story itself perhaps does not move along with the same spirit and vigour that characterise Kingsley’s earlier works; it shows, nevertheless, that he had lost none of his cunningness for dramatic situations, nor his vivid powers of visualising scenes and events of the past.

I.—­Hereward Seeks His Fortune