The head sank, never to be lifted more.  The last look of life flickered in the filmy eyes and went out.  For a moment afterward her lips moved.  Lady Lundie put her ear close to them, and heard the dreadful question reiterated, in the same dreadful words:  “She is Anne Silvester—­as I was. Will she end like Me?”

VI.

Five years passed—­and the lives of the three men who had sat at the dinner-table in the Hampstead villa began, in their altered aspects, to reveal the progress of time and change.

Mr. Kendrew; Mr. Delamayn; Mr. Vanborough.  Let the order in which they are here named be the order in which their lives are reviewed, as seen once more after a lapse of five years.

How the husband’s friend marked his sense of the husband’s treachery has been told already.  How he felt the death of the deserted wife is still left to tell.  Report, which sees the inmost hearts of men, and delights in turning them outward to the public view, had always declared that Mr. Kendrew’s life had its secret, and that the secret was a hopeless passion for the beautiful woman who had married his friend.  Not a hint ever dropped to any living soul, not a word ever spoken to the woman herself, could be produced in proof of the assertion while the woman lived.  When she died Report started up again more confidently than ever, and appealed to the man’s own conduct as proof against the man himself.

He attended the funeral—­though he was no relation.  He took a few blades of grass from the turf with which they covered her grave—­when he thought that nobody was looking at him.  He disappeared from his club.  He traveled.  He came back.  He admitted that he was weary of England.  He applied for, and obtained, an appointment in one of the colonies.  To what conclusion did all this point?  Was it not plain that his usual course of life had lost its attraction for him, when the object of his infatuation had ceased to exist?  It might have been so—­guesses less likely have been made at the truth, and have hit the mark.  It is, at any rate, certain that he left England, never to return again.  Another man lost, Report said.  Add to that, a man in ten thousand—­and, for once, Report might claim to be right.

Mr. Delamayn comes next.

The rising solicitor was struck off the roll, at his own request—­and entered himself as a student at one of the Inns of Court.  For three years nothing was known of him but that he was reading hard and keeping his terms.  He was called to the Bar.  His late partners in the firm knew they could trust him, and put business into his hands.  In two years he made himself a position in Court.  At the end of the two years he made himself a position out of Court.  He appeared as “Junior” in “a famous case,” in which the honor of a great family, and the title to a great estate were concerned.  His “Senior” fell ill on the eve of the trial.  He conducted the case for the defendant and won it.  The defendant said, “What can I do for you?” Mr. Delamayn answered, “Put me into Parliament.”  Being a landed gentleman, the defendant had only to issue the necessary orders—­and behold, Mr. Delamayn was in Parliament!