There the garde soon after discovered Horace Levinge; and, when he had been owned, they buried him in Pere la Chaise.  Such events were common then, and the police gave themselves no trouble to trace who had slain the stranger.  Among his tribes-men and kinsfolk in Houndsditch and the Minories there was great joy at first, and afterward bitter, endless litigation.  They screamed and battled over the heritage like vultures over a mighty carrion, tearing it at length piecemeal.  He did not keep a pet dog, and so no living creature regretted him, unless it were the thin, delicate girl, with white cheeks and hollow eyes, who came once, and knelt to pray by his grave for hours, her tears falling fast.

Hard as they may find it to observe other precepts of the Great Master, this one, at least, most women have practiced easily and naturally for eighteen hundred years:  “Forgive, until seventy times seven.”  The acts of some of these—­how they warred with their husbands and were worsted; how they provoked the presiding Draco, and stultified the attesting policeman by obstinately ignoring their injuries, written legibly in red, and black, and blue; how they interceded with many sobs for the aggressor—­are they not written in the book of the chronicles of Bow-street and Clerkenwell?

This propensity leads them into scrapes, it is true, for our world, in its wisdom, will take advantage of such weakness.  Perhaps the next will make them some amends.

But the mourner strewed no flowers on the grave.  It would have been too bitter a mockery; for, if there were sympathy in sweet roses and pure white lilies, on no other spot of God’s earth would they have withered so soon:  she hung up no wreath of immortelles; for, if such things could be, the dearest wish one could have formed for the dead man’s soul would have been swift, utter annihilation.

Yet Fanny Challoner would scarcely have accepted Mohun’s good offices if she had guessed that the blood of her seducer and tyrant was on his hand.  She never suspected it, and so went gratefully to the home he found for her; and there she lives yet, tranquil and contented, though always sad and humble, among people who know nothing of her history and love her dearly, trying her best to be useful in her generation—­alone in her cottage, that nestles under a sunny cliff, just above the white spray-line of the Irish Sea.

CHAPTER XXV.

“Let me see her once again. 
Let her bring her proud dark eyes,
And her petulant quick replies;
Let her wave her slender hand
With its gesture of command,
And throw back her raven hair
With the old imperial air;
Let her be as she was then—­
The loveliest lady in all the land
Iseult of Ireland.”

Mohun and Livingstone soon fell back into the groove of their old habits; if any thing, the former was more forbidding and morose, the latter more reckless than ever.