the brute for decency's sake. The awfulness of a woman's forced smile at
the devil she is tied to, loathing him and bearing in her soul the
thing, blood itself could not wipe out. Ugh! I've seen it once before,
and I recognised it in her again. There will be a bad end to this."

There probably would have been, with the aid of unlimited brandy and
unrestrained devil, some outbreak so gross that the social laws which
rule men who are "officers and gentlemen" could not have ignored or
overlooked it. But the end came in an unexpected way, and Osborn was
saved from open ignominy by an accident.

On a certain day when he had drunk heavily and had shut Hester up with
him for an hour's torture, after leaving her writhing and suffocating
with sobs, he went to examine some newly bought firearms. In twenty
minutes it was he who lay upon the floor writhing and suffocating, and
but a few minutes later he was a dead man. A charge from a gun he had
believed unloaded had finished him.

* * * * *

Lady Walderhurst was the kindest of women, as the world knew. She sent
for little Mrs. Osborn and her child, and was tender goodness itself to
them.

Hester had been in England four years, and Lord Oswyth had a brother as
robust as himself, when one heavenly summer afternoon, as the two women
sat on the lawn drinking little cups of tea, Hester made a singular
revelation, and made it without moving a muscle of her small
countenance.