He could see none; but lighting on a spot where the soil was trodden, beheld a crouching object beside a newly made grave.  She heard him, and sprang up.

‘Ell, how silly this is!’ he said indignantly.  ’Running away from home—­I never heard such a thing!  Of course I am not jealous of this unfortunate man; but it is too ridiculous that you, a married woman with three children and a fourth coming, should go losing your head like this over a dead lover! . . .  Do you know you were locked in?  You might not have been able to get out all night.’

She did not answer.

‘I hope it didn’t go far between you and him, for your own sake.’

‘Don’t insult me, Will.’

‘Mind, I won’t have any more of this sort of thing; do you hear?’

‘Very well,’ she said.

He drew her arm within his own, and conducted her out of the Cemetery.  It was impossible to get back that night; and not wishing to be recognized in their present sorry condition, he took her to a miserable little coffee-house close to the station, whence they departed early in the morning, travelling almost without speaking, under the sense that it was one of those dreary situations occurring in married life which words could not mend, and reaching their own door at noon.

The months passed, and neither of the twain ever ventured to start a conversation upon this episode.  Ella seemed to be only too frequently in a sad and listless mood, which might almost have been called pining.  The time was approaching when she would have to undergo the stress of childbirth for a fourth time, and that apparently did not tend to raise her spirits.

‘I don’t think I shall get over it this time!’ she said one day.

’Pooh! what childish foreboding!  Why shouldn’t it be as well now as ever?’

She shook her head.  ’I feel almost sure I am going to die; and I should be glad, if it were not for Nelly, and Frank, and Tiny.’

‘And me!’

‘You’ll soon find somebody to fill my place,’ she murmured, with a sad smile.  ‘And you’ll have a perfect right to; I assure you of that.’

‘Ell, you are not thinking still about that—­poetical friend of yours?’

She neither admitted nor denied the charge.  ’I am not going to get over my illness this time,’ she reiterated.  ‘Something tells me I shan’t.’

This view of things was rather a bad beginning, as it usually is; and, in fact, six weeks later, in the month of May, she was lying in her room, pulseless and bloodless, with hardly strength enough left to follow up one feeble breath with another, the infant for whose unnecessary life she was slowly parting with her own being fat and well.  Just before her death she spoke to Marchmill softly:-

’Will, I want to confess to you the entire circumstances of that—­about you know what—­that time we visited Solentsea.  I can’t tell what possessed me—­how I could forget you so, my husband!  But I had got into a morbid state:  I thought you had been unkind; that you had neglected me; that you weren’t up to my intellectual level, while he was, and far above it.  I wanted a fuller appreciator, perhaps, rather than another lover—­’