“It was her death-bed.  She was worn out in body and spirit, and had no strength to rally.  She was weeks dying, but her life was steadily ebbing all that time.  It was a kind of slow fever.  She was delirious when I first saw her, and delirious or unconscious, with few lucid intervals, until she died.  And the jargon of her wandering mind was in reality the outpouring of a tortured soul.  It was the title and the family name—­always that, and nothing else.  She wasn’t well-born enough or sufficiently educated to bear the title as his wife—­it seemed that that fact had been impressed on her again and again in the long lean years of the search for the family tree.  Let her go away ... go away somewhere quietly with Sisily, and she would never bother him any more.  That was the unceasing burden of her cry, a cry to which I was compelled to listen with a torn heart.

“The reserve, the frame of mind, which I wore like armour in Robert Turold’s company I dropped altogether at her bedside.  Her lucid intervals were few, but I was not afraid of her recognizing the old Cornish doctor with his muffler, his glasses, his shaggy white hair and beard.  The daily sight of her shrunken ageing features reminded me that I had nothing to fear—­that Time had effectually disguised us from each other’s recognition.  We were old, we two.  Life had receded from us—­what had we to do with its fever, its regrets, its passions and futile joys?  The clock had ticked the time away, the fire was dying out, the hearth desolate and cold.  I was resigned before, I was resigned then.  I did what I could for her, which was little enough.  Human progress, such as it is, has been acquired through the spirit.  The body defies us—­we have no control over it.  So she died—­mercifully unconscious most of the time—­and died, as I had hoped, without the least suspicion of the truth.

“You cannot faintly imagine the shock of Turold’s announcement on the day of her burial, to me, who had been so arrogantly certain that the secret was safe.  If you remember what took place at Flint House on that occasion you will recall that it was a question from me which brought the truth to light.  Your brother’s answer awakened my suspicions, and made me determined to find out what he actually knew.  He brought out the truth then, as I’ve no doubt now he intended to do in any case.

“The puzzle to me was the exact extent of his knowledge.  He knew two things for certain.  One was that I had married Alice before leaving England, and the other was that I was still alive.  But he obviously did not know that I was Remington.  How had he found out the two facts?  I guessed that the woman he believed to be his wife had revealed the secret of her earlier marriage on her death-bed, but the other was a problem which I could not solve.  Nor did I try to.  When I reached home I went mad.  The calmness, the self-repression of thirty years, vanished in an instant in the monstrous infamy of