should have fallen upon her with favour.  Each year since, with the bearing of each child, she had lost some of her beauty.  With each one her lovely hair fell out still more, her wild-rose colour faded, and her shape was spoiled.  She grew thin and yellow, only a scant covering of the fair hair was left her, and her eyes were big and sunken.  Her marriage having displeased her family, and Sir Jeoffry having a distaste for the ceremonies of visiting and entertainment, save where his own cronies were concerned, she had no friends, and grew lonelier and lonelier as the sad years went by.  She being so without hope and her life so dreary, her children were neither strong nor beautiful, and died quickly, each one bringing her only the anguish of birth and death.  This wintry morning her ninth lay slumbering by her side; the noise of baying dogs and boisterous men had died away with the last sound of the horses’ hoofs; the little light which came into the room through the ivied window was a faint yellowish red; she was cold, because the fire in the chimney was but a scant, failing one; she was alone—and she knew that the time had come for her death.  This she knew full well.

She was alone, because, being so disrespected and deserted by her lord, and being of a timid and gentle nature, she could not command her insufficient retinue of servants, and none served her as was their duty.  The old woman Sir Jeoffry had dubbed Mother Posset had been her sole attendant at such times as these for the past five years, because she would come to her for a less fee than a better woman, and Sir Jeoffry had sworn he would not pay for wenches being brought into the world.  She was a slovenly, guzzling old crone, who drank caudle from morning till night, and demanded good living as a support during the performance of her trying duties; but these last she contrived to make wondrous light, knowing that there was none to reprove her.

“A fine night I have had,” she had grumbled when she brought back Sir Jeoffry’s answer to her lady’s message.  “My old bones are like to break, and my back will not straighten itself.  I will go to the kitchen to get victuals and somewhat to warm me; your ladyship’s own woman shall sit with you.”

Her ladyship’s “own woman” was also the sole attendant of the two little girls, Barbara and Anne, whose nursery was in another wing of the house, and my lady knew full well she would not come if she were told, and that there would be no message sent to her.

She knew, too, that the fire was going out, but, though she shivered under the bed-clothes, she was too weak to call the woman back when she saw her depart without putting fresh fuel upon it.

So she lay alone, poor lady, and there was no sound about her, and her thin little mouth began to feebly quiver, and her great eyes, which stared at the hangings, to fill with slow cold tears, for in sooth they were not warm, but seemed to chill her poor cheeks as they rolled slowly down them, leaving a wet streak behind them which she was too far gone in weakness to attempt to lift her hand to wipe away.

“Nine times like this,” she panted faintly, “and ’tis for naught but oaths and hard words that blame me.  I was but a child myself and he loved me.  When ’twas ‘My Daphne,’ and ‘My beauteous little Daphne,’ he loved me in his own man’s way.  But now—” she faintly rolled her head from side to side.  “Women are poor things”—a chill salt tear sliding past her lips so that she tasted its bitterness—“only to be kissed for an hour, and then like this—only for this and nothing else.  I would that this one had been dead.”

Her breath came slower and more pantingly, and her eyes stared more widely.

“I was but a child,” she whispered—“a child—as—as this will be—if she lives fifteen years.”

Despite her weakness, and it was great and woefully increasing with each panting breath, she slowly laboured to turn herself towards the pillow on which her offspring lay, and, this done, she lay staring at the child and gasping, her thin chest rising and falling convulsively.  Ah, how she panted, and how she stared, the glaze of death stealing slowly over her wide-opened eyes; and yet, dimming as they were, they saw in the sleeping infant a strange and troublous thing—though it was but a few hours old ’twas not as red and crumple visaged as new-born infants usually are, its little head was covered with thick black silk, and its small features were of singular definiteness.  She dragged herself nearer to gaze.

“She looks not like the others,” she said.  “They had no beauty—and are safe.  She—she will be like—Jeoffry—and like me.”

The dying fire fell lower with a shuddering sound.

“If she is—beautiful, and has but her father, and no mother!” she whispered, the words dragged forth slowly, “only evil can come to her.  From her first hour—she will know naught else, poor heart, poor heart!”

There was a rattling in her throat as she breathed, but in her glazing eyes a gleam like passion leaped, and gasping, she dragged nearer.

“’Tis not fair,” she cried.  “If I—if I could lay my hand upon thy mouth—and stop thy breathing—thou poor thing, ’twould be fairer—but—I have no strength.”

She gathered all her dying will and brought her hand up to the infant’s mouth.  A wild look was on her poor, small face, she panted and fell forward on its breast, the rattle in her throat growing louder.  The child awakened, opening great black eyes, and with her dying weakness its new-born life struggled.  Her cold hand lay upon its mouth, and her head upon its body, for she was too far gone to move if she had willed to do so.  But the tiny creature’s strength was marvellous.  It gasped, it fought, its little limbs struggled beneath her, it writhed until the cold hand fell away, and then, its baby mouth set free, it fell a-shrieking.  Its cries were not like those of a new-born thing, but fierce and shrill, and even held the sound of infant passion.  ’Twas not a thing to let its life go easily, ’twas of those born to do battle.

Its lusty screaming pierced her ear perhaps—she drew a long, slow breath, and then another, and another still—the last one trembled and stopped short, and the last cinder fell dead from the fire.

* * * * *

When the nurse came bustling and fretting back, the chamber was cold as the grave’s self—there were only dead embers on the hearth, the new-born child’s cries filled all the desolate air, and my lady was lying stone dead, her poor head resting on her offspring’s feet, the while her open glazed eyes seemed to stare at it as if in asking Fate some awful question.

CHAPTER II—In which Sir Jeoffry encounters his offspring

In a remote wing of the house, in barren, ill-kept rooms, the poor infants of the dead lady had struggled through their brief lives, and given them up, one after the other.  Sir Jeoffry had not wished to see them, nor had he done so, but upon the rarest occasions, and then nearly always by some untoward accident.  The six who had died, even their mother had scarcely wept for; her weeping had been that they should have been fated to come into the world, and when they went out of it she knew she need not mourn their going as untimely.  The two who had not perished, she had regarded sadly day by day, seeing they had no beauty and that their faces promised none.  Naught but great beauty would have excused their existence in their father’s eyes, as beauty might have helped them to good matches which would have rid him of them.  But ’twas the sad ill fortune of the children Anne and Barbara to have been treated by Nature in a way but niggardly.  They were pale young misses, with insignificant faces and snub noses, resembling an aunt who died a spinster, as they themselves seemed most likely to.  Sir Jeoffry could not bear the sight of them, and they fled at the