colourless liquid would have hardly showed in the bottom of the glass under any circumstances, but Wyllard was careful to screen it with his hand.
Dora poured out the sleeping draught, looking at him all the while in saddest silence. What could she say to him from whose familiar face the mask had fallen? The husband she had loved and honoured was lost to her for ever. The helpless wretch lying there was a stranger to her; a sinner so begrimed with sin that only the infinite compassion of woman could behold him without loathing.
"I drink this to your future happiness, Dora," he said solemnly, "and remember that at my last hour I blessed you for your goodness to a great sinner."
There was that in his tone which warned her of his purpose. She flung out her arms, trying to seize the hand that held the glass, before he could drink. But the table was between them, and the glass was at his lips when he finished speaking. He drained it to the last drop, gave one long sigh, and fell back upon his pillow—dead.
"Hydrocyanic acid," said the local practitioner when he came to look at the corpse, "and a happy release into the bargain. I should like to have given him an overdose of morphia myself, if the law of the land would have allowed me; or to have operated on the base of his brain and killed him tenderly in the interests of science, just to find out whether Cruveilhier or Virchow was right in his theorising as to the seat of the malady. I go for Virchow, backed by Gull."
CHAPTER XXXII.
"SWEET IS DEATH FOR EVERMORE."
Dismal hours, dreary days of monotonous melancholy, a hopeless lassitude of mind and body, followed for Julian Wyllard's widow after that awful sudden death. Every one was very kind; every one was considerate; even the law was more than usually indulgent. The horror of an inquest was spared to that desolate mourner. Things were made very easy by Sir William Spencer's recent visit, by the fact that he had been heard by the servants to pronounce Mr. Wyllard's condition hopeless. Mr. Nicholls, the local practitioner, registered the cause of death as muscular atrophy, and considered himself justified in so doing, as to his mind suicide had been only a symptom of the malady, a paroxysm of despair following quickly upon Sir William Spencer's admission that the end was inevitable.
"If ever a man had a right to take his own life, that man
