And Milly, my dear companion, she is now the happy wife of that good little clergyman, Sprigge Biddlepen.  It has been in my power to be of use to them, and he shall have the next presentation to Dawling.

Meg Hawkes, proud and wayward, and the most affectionate creature on earth, was married to Tom Brice a few months after these events; and, as both wished to emigrate, I furnished them with the capital, and I am told they are likely to be rich.  I hear from my kind Meg often, and she seems very happy.

My dear old friends, Mary Quince and Mrs. Rusk, are, alas! growing old, but living with me, and very happy.  And after long solicitation, I persuaded Doctor Bryerly, the best and truest of ministers, with my dearest friend’s concurrence, to undertake the management of the Derbyshire estates.  In this I have been most fortunate.  He is the very person for such a charge—­so punctual, so laborious, so kind, and so shrewd.

In compliance with medical advice, cousin Monica hurried me away to the Continent, where she would never permit me to allude to the terrific scenes which remain branded so awfully on my brain.  It needed no constraint.  It is a sort of agony to me even now to think of them.

The plan was craftily devised.  Neither old Wyat nor Giles, the butler, had a suspicion that I had returned to Bartram.  Had I been put to death, the secret of my fate would have been deposited in the keeping of four persons only—­the two Ruthyns, Hawkes, and ultimately Madame.  My dear cousin Monica had been artfully led to believe in my departure for France, and prepared for my silence.  Suspicion might not have been excited for a year after my death, and then would never, in all probability, have pointed to Bartram as the scene of the crime.  The weeds would have grown over me, and I should have lain in that deep grave where the corpse of Madame de la Rougierre was unearthed in the darksome quadrangle of Bartram-Haugh.

It was more than two years after that I heard what had befallen at Bartram after my flight.  Old Wyat, who went early to Uncle Silas’s room, to her surprise—­for he had told her that he was that night to accompany his son, who had to meet the mailtrain to Derby at five o’clock in the morning—­saw her old master lying on the sofa, much in his usual position.

‘There was nout much strange about him,’ old Wyat said, ’but that his scent-bottle was spilt on its side over on the table, and he dead.’

She thought he was not quite cold when she found him, and she sent the old butler for Doctor Jolks, who said he died of too much ‘loddlum.’