"Hooper will watch with you to-night, Martha," Lady Helena said. "Mrs. Marsh will relieve you to-morrow. No stranger shall come near him. I will take a look at baby before going home. I shall return here early to-morrow, and I need not tell you to be very watchful!—I know you will."
"You needn't indeed, my lady," the woman answered, mournfully. "I was his mother's own maid, and I've nursed him in my arms, a little white-haired baby, many a time. I will be watchful, my lady."
Lady Helena left her and ascended to the night nursery. She had to pass the room where the tragedy had been enacted. She shivered as she went by. She found the little heir of Catheron Royals asleep in his crib, guarded by the under-nurse—head-nurse now, vice Mrs. Pool cashiered.
"Take good care of him, nurse," was Lady Helena's last charge, as she stooped and kissed him, tears in her eyes; "poor little motherless lamb."
"I'll guard him with my life, my lady," the girl answered, sturdily.
"No harm shall come to him."
Lady Helena returned to Powyss Place and her convalescent husband, her heart lying like a stone in her breast.
"If I hadn't sent for Victor that night—if I had left him at home to protect his wife, this might never have happened," she thought, remorsefully; "he would never have left her alone and unprotected, to sleep beside an open window in the chill night air."
Amid her multiplicity of occupations, amid her own great distress, she had found time to write to Mr. Dobb and his wife a touching, womanly letter. They had come down to see their dead daughter and departed again. She had been taken out of their life—raised far above them, and even in death they would not claim her.
And now that the funeral was over, Inez in prison, the tumult and excitement at an end, who shall describe the awful quiet that fell upon the old house. A ghastly stillness reigned—servants spoke in whispers, and stole from room to room—the red shadow of Murder rested in their midst. And upstairs, in that dusk chamber, while the nights fell, Sir Victor lay hovering between life and death.