From her place on the sofa by the window, Adelais Cameron looked wearily out, watching for the coming of the one she loved most upon earth.  And at last the coach drew up at the old gentleman’s gate, and she saw Maurice dismount from the box-seat by the driver and open the coach door to hand out a handsome lady, with dark hair and bright glowing eyes.

“Who is that?” she asked of the maid, who was arranging the tea-table beside her.

“Don’t you know, Miss?” said the girl, surprised at the inquiry.  “That’s Mrs Maurice, the rich young lady he married in India a year ago; I was told all about it by the cook at Mr. Gray’s, ever-so-long ago.”

But as the words were spoken, Stephen entered the room with a message for Philip Cameron, and overheard both the question and the answer.  Adelais turned towards him and said, “Stephen, you never told me that Maurice had a wife.”

The next week they buried the old wine merchant very quietly and simply.  Only three mourners attended the funeral,—­Stephen and Maurice and Philip Cameron; but Adelais, looking down on them from her casement corner, as the coffin was carried forth from the house, laid her golden head on her aunt’s bosom and cried, “Auntie, auntie, I never thought to live so long as this!  Why must those always die who are needed most, while such as I live on from year to year?  I fancied I had only a few weeks left me upon earth when we came back to Kensington, and yet here I am still!”

Then after a little while the brothers parted once more; Maurice and his wife went back to India, and Stephen was left alone, sole successor to his father’s business, and master of the old house.  But Adelais Cameron still lived on, like the shadow of her former self, fading in the sunset of her womanhood, the beauty sapped out from her white death-like face, and the glitter of youth and the sweetness of hope quenched for ever in the depths of her luminous eyes.

Then when the days of mourning were over, Stephen came again to Adelais, to renew the wooing of old times; for he said to himself, “Now that Maurice is married, and my father dead, she may pity me, seeing me so lone and desolate; and I may comfort her for the past, and make her amends with my love, for the pain and the bitterness that are gone by.”

But when he knelt alone by the couch whereon Adelais lay, and held her white blue-veined hands in his and told his errand, she turned her face from him and wept sore, as women weep over the dead.

“Adelais, O Adelais,” he cried in his despair, “Why will you refuse me always?  Don’t you see my heart is breaking for love of you?  Come home with me and be my wife at last!”

But she made answer very sadly and slowly:—­