“No, no.  I want no priests; no better than we are, Dick.  Harold is a proud sinner; Lord, what a proud sinner he is!” Then, with a glint of her usual temper, “He’d snub the twelve apostles if he met them without mitres.  No priests, Dick.  It is you I want.  I have left you eight thousand pounds—­all I could save, Dick.  Everything goes back to William now; but the eight thousand pounds is yours.  Arabella is witness to it.  Dick, Dick, you will think of me sometimes?”

And Hyde kissed her fondly.  Ugly, heartless, sinful, she might be to others; but to him she had been a double mother.  “I’ll never forget you,” he answered; “never, grandmother.”

“I know what the town will say:  ’Well, well, old Lady Capel has gone to her deserts at last.’  Don’t mind them, Dick.  Let them talk.  They will have to go too; it’s the old round—­meat and mirth, and then to bed—­a—­long—­sleep.”

“Grandmother?”

“I hear you, Dick.  Good-night.”

“Is there anything you want done?  Think, dear grandmother.”

“Don’t let Exmouth come to my funeral.  I don’t want him—­grinning over—­my coffin.”

“Any other thing?”

“Put me beside Jack Capel.  I wonder—­if I shall—­see Jack.”  A shadow, gray and swift, passed over her face.  Her eyes flashed one piteous look into Hyde’s eyes, and then closed forever.

And while in the rainy, dreary London twilight Lady Capel was dying, Katherine was in the garden at Hyde Manor, watching the planting of seeds that were in a few weeks to be living things of beauty and sweetness.  It had ceased raining at noon in Norfolk, and the gravel walks were perfectly dry, and the air full of the fragrance of innumerable violets.  All the level land was wearing buttercups.  Full of secrets, of fluttering wings, and building nests were the trees.  In the apple-blooms the bees were humming, delirious with delight.  From the beehives came the peculiar and exquisite odour of virgin wax.  Somewhere near, also, the gurgle of running water spread an air of freshness all around.

[Illustration:  She was stretched upon a sofa]

And Katherine, with a little basket full of flower-seeds, was going with the gardener from bed to bed, watching him plant them.  No one who had seen her in the childlike loveliness of her early girlhood could have imagined the splendour of her matured beauty.  She had grown “divinely tall,” and the exercise of undisputed authority had added a gracious stateliness of manner.  Her complexion was wonderful, her large blue eyes shining with tender lights, her face full of sympathetic revelations.  Above all, she had that nameless charm which comes from a freedom from all anxious thought for the morrow; that charm of which the sweet secret is generally lost after the twentieth summer.  Her basket of seeds was clasped to her side within the hollow of her left arm, and with her right hand she lifted a long petticoat of quilted blue satin.  Above this garment she wore a gown of wood-coloured taffeta, sprigged with rose-buds, and a stomacher of fine lace to match the deep rufflings on her elbow-sleeves.