featured mould of clay left, cold and white, in the conjugal couch, he felt his bereavement—who shall say how little? Yet, perhaps, more than he seemed to feel it, for he was not a man from whom grief easily wrung tears.
His dry-eyed and sober mourning scandalized an old housekeeper, and likewise a female attendant, who had waited upon Mrs. Helstone in her sickness, and who, perhaps, had had opportunities of learning more of the deceased lady’s nature, of her capacity for feeling and loving, than her husband knew: they gossiped together over the corpse, related anecdotes, with embellishments of her lingering decline, and its real or supposed cause; in short, they worked each other up to some indignation against the austere little man who sat examining papers in an adjoining room, unconscious of what opprobrium he was the object.
Mrs. Helstone was hardly under the sod when rumours began to be rife in the neighbourhood that she had died of a broken heart; these magnified quickly into reports of hard usage, and, finally, details of harsh treatment on the part of her husband; reports grossly untrue, but not the less eagerly received on that account. Mr. Yorke heard them, partly believed them. Already, of course, he had no friendly feeling to his successful rival; though himself a married man now, and united to a woman who seemed a complete contrast to Mary Cave in all respects, he could not forget the great disap-
