"Good gracious, Mrs. Mellor, you don't mean to say you have been to the hospital and got back again since! But why do I say such a thing? If you had wings you couldn't do it," exclaimed kind-hearted Mrs. Pemberton as Kate Mellor walked into the greengrocer's shop in Leeham, hard by Welford, the same day William Crawford jumped aboard the moving steamboat after his immersion and scene with the invalid woman at the Mercantile Pier.

"No," answered Mrs. Mellor wearily. She did not remove her veil on entering the shop. "I hadn't the heart to go to-day. I got as far as the pier and then turned back." She did not care to enter into any further explanation.

"Hadn't the heart, dear child! And why hadn't you the heart?" said the sympathetic woman, raising her ponderous bulk with deliberation from the chair, and going quickly with outstretched hands to her unfortunate lodger.

"I didn't feel equal to it, and so I came back."

"Well, dear if you didn't go to the hospital I'm very glad you came back here straight, for the house seems queer and lonesome when you're not in it. You don't feel any worse, do you, dear?"

"No worse, thank you, Mrs. Pemberton, but I think the heat tired me a little, and that I'll go up and lie down awhile."

"The very best thing you could do, dear. There's nothing to freshen you up when you're hot and tired like a nice quiet rest in a cool room; and the sun is off your room now. I was just saying to Mrs. Pearse here, that I was sure you'd come in half-dead of the heat. Is there anything I could get you, dear, before you lie down?"

"No, thank you, Mrs. Pemberton," and Kate Mellor passed out of the shop and up to her bedroom on the first floor.

"That's just the way with her always," said Mrs. Pemberton to Mrs. Pearse. "She never complains of anything but being tired, and she never wants anything. If ever there was a broken heart in this world it's hers. She has said to me over and over again it was a mistake that she recovered. What makes me so uneasy about her is that I am afraid her money won't last her much longer, and that when it's gone she'll run away. Though, goodness knows, she's welcome to stay as long as she likes, for she's a real lady, and it's almost as easy to keep two as one, particularly as she isn't a bit particular about what she eats or drinks; and I don't want to let her room unless I could get some one as nice as she, and I'd go far before I could find her equal."

"The loss of the child is preying upon her mind," said Mrs. Pearse. "I remember when I lost my little Ted, I thought I should never be able to lift my head again."

"Ah, but you lost your little Ted in a natural though a sad way; but poor Mrs. Mellor lost her boy by an accident, as it were, and by her own act, too. You know, she is very close, and although she's as friendly as can be, she never says anything about the past. Whoever she sent the boy to will not give him back to her again."

"And you don't know to what person she sent the child?"

"He went first to Boland's Ait, but of course not to stop there. Why, there's no woman on the Ait to look after a child. The boy must be gone to some of his father's people. O, it's a sad, sad case! and I have a feeling--you can't help your feelings--that she's not long for this world, poor thing; and it breaks my heart to think of that, for I do love her as if she was my own child, though it was never given to me to know the feelings of a mother. I expect that private detective knew all about the case."

Meanwhile Kate Mellor had taken off her bonnet and cloak, and lain down on her bed, to rest and think. Up to that day she had lived hour by hour, since the loss of her boy and her recovery, with no definite purpose. At first she had been too ill and weak to consider her position or determine upon any course of action. She had drifted down to this hour without any plan or purpose. She knew the law would not enable her to recover her child, and she felt certain that her husband would see the child dead rather than restored to her arms. She had inserted the announcement of her death partly that her husband might not be fettered in anything he might design for the welfare of their child by considerations of her, and partly out of a pathetic craving for pain and self-sacrifice. She had bought the paper, and had cried a score of times over the bald, cold intimation that the world was over for her: for her the once beautiful and beloved bride of Frank Mellor, now the deserted, marred outcast of shame. She had wept that she, Kate Ray, Kate Mellor, was dead and buried before thirty--when she was not twenty-five. She had wept that she was poor. She had wept that her voice, her only means of earning a living, had been destroyed. She had wept longest of all that her beauty was gone from her for ever. Her beauty had been her greatest gift, her greatest curse, and she wept for it as though it had been an unmixed blessing.

Lying on her bed here to-day, she had no tears to shed. The scene on the pier had in some mysterious way calmed her spirits. She had read the announcement of her death in the paper, and now she was dead in verity.

Why should she live? What had she to live for? Everything woman could hold dear was gone--husband, child, reputation, beauty. In material affairs her destitution could scarcely be greater than it was at this moment. She had a little money still left, but when that was gone where should she find more? He, the betrayer, had been overjoyed to get his life back from the jaws of death that day; she, the victim, would enter those awful jaws freely, But she must see her child, her little Frank, the sweet baby she had held at her breast and cherished with the warmth of her embraces.

She was afraid of only one person in the world, and that was Frank Mellor, who had changed his name to Francis Bramwell for shame of her. If he found her he would kill her, and she owned that at his hands she deserved death; she had robbed him of everything he held dear.

She had resolved upon death, but she could not take it at his hands. It was too awful to think of a meeting between them. That would be ten times worse than the most painful form of quitting life. That would be an agony of the spirit ten thousand times transcending any possible agony of the body.

Frank, her husband, had always been a man of strong feeling. At times this strong feeling had exhibited itself to her in profound taciturnity, at times in overwhelming ecstasy. If she should encounter him now, he would be possessed by the demon of insatiable revenge; he would strike her to the ground and murder her cruelly, and mangle her dead body. While he was beating the life out of her he would revile and curse her. He would heap coals of fire on her head, and crush out of her the last trace of self-respect. And in all this he would, perhaps, be justified--in much of it certainly.

How good and indulgent he had been to her! She had not understood him then. She had eyes for nothing then but admiration and finery. To-day she had nothing to call forth admiration--no finery; and yet, if she had not hearkened to that other man, could she believe that Frank would not love and shield and cherish her now as he had then? Frank was the very soul of honour. He would not hurt a brute or wrong any living being. She had not known, had not understood, him then as she did now, judged by the light of subsequent experience.

She must see the boy once more--just once more before she died. She would not look upon another day. By some means or other she would see her child, and then bid good-bye to the world. When she saw her child, there would be the canal close at hand. But that would not do. It would not do to pollute with the last crime of her life the presence of her child. No; the river of which that other man had stood in such terror would be the fitting ending place for such a wicked life as hers.

"O, how different would all have been if only that man had not tempted her with lies, and she had not listened through vanity! Frank would have been good and kind to her, and by this time she should have grown to love him as she had never loved the other; and her boy, her darling, her little Frank, her baby, would be with her, his arms round her neck, his soft, round, warm cheek against her own!

"But, there, there, there!" she moaned, putting her hand before her blotched, disfigured, worn face. "It is all over! I have lost everything, and no one is to blame but myself and the other. Only I must suffer all. Yet it will not be for long. I will see my boy to-night, even if I die there and then. I don't care about dying. Death has refused me once, but it shall not this time. O, my little Frank! my little innocent Frank! my baby that I warmed against my breast!"

She lay in a kind of torpor for a few hours; then having got up and made some small arrangements, she wrote a note for Mrs. Pemberton, placed it in her trunk, and, putting a lock of hair and an old worn glove of her boy's in her bosom, went down-stairs and slipped out by the private door beside the shop.