It broke her heart.  If she failed to receive the regular letter, she pined and was disconsolate.  He has heard more of me! was in her mind.  Her husband sat looking at her with his old large grey glassy eyes.  You would have fancied him awaiting her death as the signal for his own release.  But she, poor mother, behind her weeping lids beheld her son’s filial love of her wounded and bleeding.  When there was anything to be done for her, old Kirby was astir.  When it was nothing, either in physic or assistance, he was like a great corner of rock.  You may indeed imagine grief in the very rock that sees its flower fading to the withered shred.  On the last night of her life this old man of past ninety carried her in his arms up a flight of stairs to her bed.

A week after her burial, Kirby was found a corpse in the mountain forest.  His having called the death of his darling his lightning-stroke must have been the origin of the report that he died of lightning.  He touched not a morsel of food from the hour of the dropping of the sod on her coffin of ebony wood.  An old crust of their mahogany bread, supposed at first to be a specimen of quartz, was found in one of his coat pockets.  He kissed his girl Carinthia before going out on his last journey from home, and spoke some wandering words.  The mine had not been worked for a year.  She thought she would find him at the mouth of the shaft, where he would sometimes be sitting and staring, already dead at heart with the death he saw coming to the beloved woman.  They had to let her down with ropes, that she might satisfy herself he was not below.  She and her great dog and a faithful man-servant discovered the body in the forest.  Chillon arrived from England to see the common grave of both his parents.

And now good-bye to sorrow for a while.  Keep your tears for the living.  And first I am going to describe to you the young Earl of Fleetwood, son of the strange Welsh lady, the richest nobleman of his time, and how he persued and shunned the lady who had fascinated him, Henrietta, the daughter of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham; and how he met Carinthia Jane; and concerning that lovely Henrietta and Chillon Kirby-Levellier; and of the young poet of ordinary parentage, and the giant Captain Abrane, and Livia the widowed Countess of Fleetwood, Henrietta’s cousin, daughter of Curtis Fakenham; and numbers of others; Lord Levellier, Lord Brailstone, Lord Simon Pitscrew, Chumley Potts, young Ambrose Mallard; and the English pugilist, such a man of honour though he drank; and the adventures of Madge, Carinthia Jane’s maid.  Just a few touches.  And then the marriage dividing Great Britain into halves, taking sides.  After that, I trust you may go on, as I would carry you were we all twenty years younger, had I but sooner been in possession of these treasured papers.  I promise you excitement enough, if justice is done to them.  But I must and will describe the wedding.  This young Earl of Fleetwood, you should know, was a very powder-magazine of ambition, and never would he break his word:  which is right, if we are properly careful; and so he—­