He gave her his hand, saying, “My son has gone out of town to see his cousin, who is ill.  He will return in two or three days, and then they will both come to me at Raynham.”

Mrs. Berry took the tips of his fingers, and went half-way to the floor perpendicularly.  “He pass her like a stranger in the park this evenin’,” she faltered.

“Ah?” said the baronet.  “Yes, well! they will be at Raynham before the week is over.”

Mrs. Berry was not quite satisfied.  “Not of his own accord he pass that sweet young wife of his like a stranger this day, Sir Austin!”

“I must beg you not to intrude further, ma’am.”

Mrs. Berry bobbed her bunch of a body out of the room.

“All’s well that ends well,” she said to herself.  “It’s just bad inquirin’ too close among men.  We must take ’em somethin’ like Providence—­as they come.  Thank heaven!  I kep’ back the baby.”

In Mrs. Berry’s eyes the baby was the victorious reserve.

Adrian asked his chief what he thought of that specimen of woman.

“I think I have not met a better in my life,” said the baronet, mingling praise and sarcasm.

Clare lies in her bed as placid as in the days when she breathed; her white hands stretched their length along the sheets, at peace from head to feet.  She needs iron no more.  Richard is face to face with death for the first time.  He sees the sculpture of clay—­the spark gone.

Clare gave her mother the welcome of the dead.  This child would have spoken nothing but kind commonplaces had she been alive.  She was dead, and none knew her malady.  On her fourth finger were two wedding-rings.

When hours of weeping had silenced the mother’s anguish, she, for some comfort she saw in it, pointed out that strange thing to Richard, speaking low in the chamber of the dead; and then he learnt that it was his own lost ring Clare wore in the two worlds.  He learnt from her husband that Clare’s last request had been that neither of the rings should be removed.  She had written it; she would not speak it.

“I beg of my husband, and all kind people who may have the care of me between this and the grave, to bury me with my hands untouched.”

The tracing of the words showed the bodily torment she was suffering, as she wrote them on a scrap of paper found beside her pillow.

In wonder, as the dim idea grew from the waving of Clare’s dead hand, Richard paced the house, and hung about the awful room; dreading to enter it, reluctant to quit it.  The secret Clare had buried while she lived, arose with her death.  He saw it play like flame across her marble features.  The memory of her voice was like a knife at his nerves.  His coldness to her started up accusingly:  her meekness was bitter blame.

On the evening of the fourth day, her mother came to him in his bedroom, with a face so white that he asked himself if aught worse could happen to a mother than the loss of her child.  Choking she said to him, “Read this,” and thrust a leather-bound pocket-book trembling in his hand.  She would not breathe to him what it was.  She entreated him not to open it before her.