One comfort she took to her sad heart, that Rainham had not condemned her; that he had only pitied her, while he reserved his damnation for the iron-bound, Sabbatarian world which had ruined and spurned another helpless victim.  Rainham she believed implicitly, obeyed unquestioningly, with a sense of gratitude which had been largely mingled with self-reproach, until he had told her that, so far as he was concerned, she had nothing to reproach herself with.  It never occurred to her for a moment now to question or to resent the part he had made her play on that tragical afternoon in Grove Road.  Why should she?  The imputation of a lie, what was that to her?  Had he not taken it all, all her misery upon himself?  Had he not fed, and clothed, and lodged her like the most penitent of prodigals, although she had no claim upon him until he chose to give it to her?  Her benefactor could do no wrong, that was her creed; and it made things wonderfully smooth, the future on a sudden strangely simple.  She had lied to him at the bidding of the other, and he had not resented it when he came to know the truth:  she had brought shame on him, and he had not reproached her.  A man like this was outside her experience; she regarded him with a kind of grateful amazement—­a wondering veneration, which sometimes held her dumb in his presence.

If she had felt unhappy at first about the future of her child—­and there had been moments when this thought had been more bitter than all the rest of her life together—­this care was taken from her when Rainham promised to adopt the little girl, or, better still, to induce Mrs. Bullen to open her motherly heart to her.  “They’ll be only too glad to get her,” he had said decisively, interrupting her awkward little speech of thanks.  “That will be all right.  Mrs. Bullen hasn’t known what to do with herself since her son went to sea; she wants a child to care for.  You needn’t worry yourself about that.”

It was after this that Kitty had owned to the nurse that she had no desire to live; and though the shifting of this burden enabled her to carry her life for a time less wearily, the end was not far; and the news of her death came to Rainham just after the first snowfall, in the middle of a dreary, cruel December.

The winter wore on, and still Rainham was to be seen almost nightly in his now familiar corner by the fireside at Brodonowski’s, in the seat next that which had become Oswyn’s by right of almost immemorial occupation.  His negotiations with the company who were to buy him out of his ancestral dock were still incomplete, and now he felt a strange reluctance to hurry matters, to hasten the day on which he should be forced to leave the little room looking out upon the unprofitable river which he loved.