“How lovely you were when I found you, Frances,” he said.  “Do you remember the evening—­you were bending over the crysanthemums?”

“I shall forget my own life and my own soul before I forget that,” she replied.

And I said to myself:  “Even if my suspicion be perfectly true, have I any right to mar such love as that?” I noticed that during all the conversation about the locket, she never once looked at me.

We went to Vale Royal, and there never was man so bewildered as I. Lance proposed that we should go visiting with Mrs. Fleming.

“Get your purse ready, John,” he said—­“this visit will require a small fortune.”

“I find the poor value kind words as much as money,” said the beautiful woman.

“Then they must be very disinterested,” he said, laughingly—­“I should prefer money.”

“You are only jesting,” she said.

It was a pretty sight to see her go into those poor, little, dirty houses.  There was no pride, no patronage, no condescension—­she was simply sweetly natural; she listened to their complaints, gave them comfort and relieved their wants.  As I watched her I could not help thinking to myself that if I were a fashionable or titled lady, this would be my favorite relaxation—­visiting and relieving the poor.  I never saw so much happiness purchased by a few pounds.  We came to a little cottage that stood by itself in a garden.

“Are you growing tired?” she asked of her husband.

“I never tire with you,” he replied.

“And you, Mr. Ford?” she said.

She never overlooked or forgot me, but studied my comfort on every occasion.  I could have told her that I was watching what was to me a perfect problem—­the kindly, gentle, pitying deeds of a woman, who had, I believed, murdered her own child.

“I am not tired, Mrs. Fleming, I am interested,” I said.

The little cottage which stood in the midst of a wild patch of garden was inhabited by a day-laborer.  He was away at work; his wife sat at home nursing a little babe, a small, fair, tiny child, evidently not more than three weeks old, dying, too, if one could judge from the face.

She bent over it—­the beautiful, graceful woman who was Lance’s wife.  Ah, Heaven! the change that came over her, the passion of mother love that came into her face; she was transformed.

“Let me hold the little one for you,” she said, “while you rest for a few minutes;” and the poor, young mother gratefully accepted the offer.

What a picture she made in the gloomy room of the little cottage, her beautiful face and shining hair, her dress sweeping the ground, and the tiny child lying in her arms.

“Does it suffer much?” she asked, in her sweet, compassionate voice.

“It did, ma’am,” replied the mother, “but I have given it something to keep it quiet.”

“Do you mean to say that you have drugged it?” asked Mrs. Fleming.