"Perhaps that will atone," she murmured vaguely. "And perhaps God will not take away my reason, after all."
And then she began to fumble among the things upon her dressing-table for the little bottle that contained her nightly sleeping draught.
Mrs. Romaine's letter was brought to Lady Alice before she rose next morning. It contained these words:—
"I told you what was not true to-day. Your husband never asked me to go away with him—he never cared for me. I loved him, that was all. His carelessness drove me mad—I tried to revenge myself on him by making you suffer. But you would not believe me, and you were right. Pity me if you can, and pray for me.
"Rosalind Romaine."
"Ah, poor soul!" thought Alice Brooke, her eyes filling with tears. "I do pity her—I do, with all my heart. God help her!"
And she said those words again—useless as they might be—when, by and by, a messenger came hurrying to the house with the news that Mrs. Romaine had been found dead that morning—dead, from an overdose of the chloral which she kept beside her for sleeplessness. And so the life of false aims and perverted longings came to its appointed end.
There was never a cloud on Alice Brooke's domestic happiness, never a shadow of distrust between her and her husband, after this. For some little time they changed their mode of life—giving up the house in Bloomsbury and spending long, blissful months in Italy and the Tyrol. It was like another honeymoon. And when they returned to London, Caspar took a house in a sunnier and pleasanter region than Upper Woburn Place, but not so far away as to prevent him from visiting the Macclesfield Club on Sundays, and having a chat with Jim Gregson and his other workman friends. These workmen and their wives came also in their turn to Mr. Brooke's abode, where there was not only a gentle and gracious lady to preside at the table (where twelve especially valued silver spoons always held a place of honor), but a very remarkable baby in the nursery; and it was Mr. Brooke's continual regret that he had not insisted on naming his son and heir Macclesfield, after the workmen's buildings, instead of the more commonplace Maurice, after Maurice Kenyon. But Maurice and Lesley returned the compliment by calling their eldest child Caspar, although Lesley did say saucily that she thought it a very ugly name.