And what of the woman who was both the lure and the victim of this union without heart? Although she was, after a fashion, in love with him, it was still not in her favour that Robina Armour, after experiencing his first advances, should have at last consented to marry sir Wilton Lestrange.

For what she was really in love with was the gentleman of her own imagining whom she saw in the baronet, while the baronet, on his part, was what he called in love with what he called the woman. As he was overcome by her beauty, so was she by his rank—an idol at whose clay feet is cast many a spiritual birthright. Yet despite this misplacement of grounds for marriage, the blacksmith’s daughter was in many respects a woman of good sense, with much real refinement, and a genuine regard for right. Sir Wilton had never loved her with what was best in him. Had his better nature been awake, it would have justified the bond and been strengthened by it.

Lady Lestrange’s father was a good blacksmith, occasionally drunk in his youth, but persistently sober now in his middle-age. He had accounted it the prime duty of existence to take care of oneself, and communicated much of this belief to his younger daughter. After marrying sir Wilton, however, Death knocked at her door with the cry of her first child, and she went with him when the child was but an hour old.

Not one of her husband’s family was in the house when she died. Sir Wilton himself was in London, and had been for the last six months, preferring the city and his club to Mortgrange and his wife. When a telegram informed him that she was in danger, he did go home. But when he arrived she had been an hour gone, and he congratulated himself that he had taken the second train.

There had been between them no approach to any depth of union. When what sir Wilton called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire with a resentful feeling that the handsome woman—his superior in everything genuinely human, if not in rank—had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth was, she had ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her, it lay in the dulled eye of the swiftly deteriorating man, which grew less and less capable of seeing things as they were and transmitted falser and falser impressions of them. The light that was in him was darkness.

He was decent enough, however, not to parade his relief about. He retired to the library, lit a cigar, and sat down to wish the unpleasant fuss of the funeral over, and the house rid of the disagreeable presence. Had the woman died of some disease which he himself might one day have to face, her death might, as he sat there, have chanced to raise for an instant the watery ghost of an emotion. But as it was, he had no sympathetic interest in her death any more than in herself. Relaxing back in the easiest of chairs, he revolved in his mind the turns of last night’s play at the theater, until it occurred to him that he might soon by a second marriage make amends in the eyes of his neighbours for their disapproval of his first. So pleasant was the thought that he fell asleep brooding upon it.