Presently she stopped the carriage, and walked to the top of a little knoll commanding what had been Isleworth Hill, but was now a black smoking blot on the landscape.  The white front of the house was still standing, though riven from top to bottom, and through its empty window-places the westering sun poured great streams of fire which looked like flame shining through the eye-sockets of a gigantic skull.

“I did that well,” she said; “and yet how blind I was!  I should have known that he spoke the truth when he said the letters were not there.  My skill failed me—­it always does fail at need.  I thought the fire would reach them somehow.”

When she arrived at Rewtham House, she found that Sir John had left, taking luggage with him, and stating that he was going to put up at an inn at Roxham.  On the hall-table, too, lay a summons to attend the inquest on the body of George Caresfoot, which was to take place on the morrow.  She tore it across.  Then she went up and dressed herself for dinner with such splendour that her maid thought it necessary to remind her that there was no company coming.

“No,” she said, with a strange smile; “but I am going out to-night.  Give me my sapphire necklace.”

She sat through dinner, and afterwards went into the drawing-room, and opening a despatch-box, read and burnt a great number of papers.

“There go the keys to my knowledge,” she said aloud, as they flickered and fell into ashes.  “No one shall reap the fruits of my labours; and yet it is a pity—­I was on the right track, and, though I could never have succeeded, another might.  I had the key, though I could not find the lock.  I must go through with it now.  I cannot live deprived both of success and of my secret power, and I could never begin and climb that stair again.”

Then, from a secret drawer in the despatch-box, she extracted a little phial, tightly stoppered and sealing-waxed.  She examined it closely, and looked at the liquid in it against the light.

“My medicine has taken no harm during this twenty years,” she thought.  “It still looks what it is—­strong enough to kill a giant, and subtle enough to leave little trace upon a child.”  Then she shut up the despatch-box and put it away, and, going to the open window, looked up at the stars, and then down at the shadows flung by the clouds as they swept across the moon.

“Shadows,” she mused, “below, and gleams of light between the shadows —­that is like our life.  Light above—­pure, clear, eternal—­that is like the wider life.  And between the two—­the night, and above them both—­the stars.