them either clergymen or about to be ordained.  Between one of them, a young fellow looking out for his first curacy, and Mary an attachment had sprung up, which Mary could not even now speak of.  She hurried over it, with a trembling voice, to the tragedy beyond.  Mr. Shelton got his curacy, went off to a parish in the Lincolnshire Fens, and there was talk of their being married in a year or so.  But the exposure of a bitter winter’s night, risked in the struggle across one of the bleakest flats of the district to carry the Sacrament to a dying parishioner, had brought on a peculiar and agonising form of neuralgia.  And from this pain, so nobly earned, had sprung—­oh! mystery of human fate!—­a morphia-habit, with all that such a habit means for mind and body.  It was discovered by the poor fellow’s brother, who brought him up to London and tried to cure him.  Meanwhile he himself had written to Mary to give her up.  “I have no will left, and am no longer a man,” he wrote to her.  “It would be an outrage on my part, and a sin on yours, if we did not cancel our promise.”  Charles, who took a hard, ascetic view, held much the same language, and Mary submitted, heart-broken.

Then came a gleam of hope.  The brother’s care and affection prevailed; there were rumours of great improvement, of a resumption of work.  “Just two years ago, when you first came here, I was beginning to believe”—­she turned away her head to hide the rise of tears—­“that it might still come right.”  But after some six or eight months of clerical work in London fresh trouble developed, lung mischief showed itself, and the system, undermined by long and deep depression, seemed to capitulate at once.

“He died last December, at Madeira,” said Mary, quietly.  “I saw him before he left England.  We wrote to each other almost to the end.  He was quite at peace.  This letter here was from the chaplain at Madeira, who was kind to him, to tell me about his grave.”

That was all.  It was the sort of story that somehow might have been expected to belong to Mary Harden—­to her round, plaintive face, to her narrow, refined experience; and she told it in a way eminently characteristic of her modes of thinking, religious or social, with old-fashioned or conventional phrases which, whatever might be the case with other people, had lost none of their bloom or meaning for her.

Marcella’s face showed her sympathy.  They talked for half an hour, and at the end of it Mary flung her arms round her companion’s neck.

“There!” she said, “now we must not talk any more about it.  I am glad I told you.  It was a comfort.  And somehow—­I don’t mean to be unkind; but I couldn’t have told you in the old days—­it’s wonderful how much better I like you now than I used to do, though perhaps we don’t agree much better.”

Both laughed, though the eyes of both were full of tears.

* * * * *

Presently they were in the village together.  As they neared the Hurds’ old cottage, which was now empty and to be pulled down, a sudden look of disgust crossed Marcella’s face.