A silent party was assembled in the large old-fashioned room in which Margaret's presence was awaited. On the high mantel clusters of tall wax-candles were grouped, which failed to light the dusky apartment half-way along its length or across its breadth, but threw their lustre around the hearth, covered with a Turkey rug.  
Hayes Meredith leaned moodily against the fluted side of the grim black-marble chimneypiece, with one foot on the brass fender, and his keen dark glance turned towards the glowing red fire. James Dugdale sat in a heavy arm-chair, his head leaning back against the red-leather cushion, his long thin fingers grasping the sides of the chair, his face, always pale, now of an ashen-gray colour, and the nervous tremor which pervaded his entire frame painfully evident to the two stronger men. Mr. Baldwin paced the room with folded arms. All three were silent. They had said all that was to be said in the absence of her whom their consultation concerned so deeply.
 
A light tread in the passage outside the door caught Mr. Baldwin's strained ear. James Dugdale heard it too, but he did not move; he only closed his eyes, and passed his hand across his brow. In another moment Margaret was in the room, was within the luminous circle made by the light, and had advanced towards Meredith. Her face was deadly pale, but her eyes were bright, and the old look of resolution which he had so often remarked and admired struck him once more, with his first glance at her. Her figure was as slight and girlish as when he had seen her last, the principal change was in the rich dress, now become habitual to her.
 
Hayes Meredith tried hard to make his earnest greeting as gladsome as it might have been; to say, "I told you we should meet again--you see I was a true prophet;" but there was something in her face which made it quite impossible. She shook hands with him, and then she turned to James, who had now stood up, and laid her hand upon his shoulder. Fitzwilliam Baldwin made no sign. The worst had come now, and he had very little strength to face it.
 
"James," she said, "is my father dead?"
 
"Good God, Margaret," he made answer, catching her hands in his, "no! What can have put such an idea, such a fear, into your mind? He is quite well."
 
She kissed him on the cheek, and sat down, keeping her hand on his arm still, and, slightly turning her head towards Baldwin, said in a quiet voice,
 
"I know there is something wrong. My husband is concealing something from me; he is right in having concealed it so far, for he is always right--" she paused for a moment to smile at him, and then Meredith did not know the face--he had never seen that look in it--"and he has asked you to meet us here and tell me what it is, because he cannot bear to tell me himself. Well, I will hear anything you have to tell me, if it is his wish"--again she paused and smiled at him--"but he is here, and well; my father, and my child, and you"--she pressed James's arm with the hand that lay upon it--"are well; what can there be for me to fear so very much that my husband should dread to tell it to me himself?"
 
She turned an earnest, imploring gaze on James, and saw the look he directed at Meredith. Baldwin stepped hastily towards her, but she stretched her hand out, and shrank away from him. The terrible truth was fast swooping down upon her now.
 
"It does not come from him," she said breathlessly; "it is the resurrection of the past--it is my old dread--it is bad news that you have brought"--her white face addressed itself to Meredith--"tell me what it is quickly, for God's sake! I can bear to know it--I cannot bear the suspense."
 
"I will tell you, my dear," said Meredith; and he left his place, and put his strong arm round her--the other two stood side by side at a little distance. "It is bad news, but not very bad; the trouble it brings will soon be over, and no ill can ever come of it. Do you remember when we heard, one night when you were at my house, that Hungerford had been murdered?"
 
She started, and said, "Yes, yes."
 
"You recollect the date?"
 
"Perfectly." Her voice was hardly audible.
 
"He did not meet that dreadful fate, Margaret. He did not die thus, or then."
 
"Thank God!" she said. And then, in a bewildered way, she thought for a moment, and cried out, "He is not dead! He is not dead! That is your news--your dreadful news!"
 
"No, my darling, no," said Mr. Baldwin, coming to her side. "It is not so bad as that. Thank God, your fears are so far beyond the truth. He is dead. We are not parted. No, no."
 
"No, no," continued Meredith, still holding her; "it is not so bad as that. Hungerford is dead; I saw his body, and I gave it decent burial; but he did not die until long after the time when you believed him dead."
 
"When did he die?" she asked. The relief was immense; but if the news she was to hear was only that, it was rather good than bad. "When did he die?"
 
Meredith hesitated. Baldwin turned away.
 
"Tell me," she insisted.
 
"He died only a short time ago," said Meredith slowly. "He died only a few days before I left Melbourne."
 
She was still standing, upheld by his arm, but she lost consciousness for a little as she stood. He placed her gently in a chair, and they kept aloof from her, until her eyes opened, and she drew a long breath. Then she lifted her hand to her forehead, and slowly pushed the hair away from it.
 
"You are better now?" said James.
 
"I am quite well," she said. "Let me understand this. I don't quite take it in."
 
"It is better that she should understand all about it at once, Baldwin," said Meredith. "The shock is over now, and time must not be lost. The only difference this unfortunate affair will make to you, my dear, is that you must be married over again."
 
He spoke the words with extreme reluctance, and Margaret's face crimsoned.
 
"What," she exclaimed, "do you mean?" And then she said gently, "Ah--yes--I see--I understand," and covering her face with her hands she burst into tears.
 
Mr. Baldwin knelt down by her chair, and gently drew one hand from before her eyes.
 
"I think you had better leave her with me now for a little while," he said.
 
The two men went silently away.
 
 
All through the hours of the wintry night, Margaret strove with the anguish that had come on her as bravely as she had striven against that which had turned her youth to bitterness. But she strove now with a different kind of strength, and she had consolation then denied to her. Yet even in that consolation there was more sorrow. In the past she had stood alone, her grief was hers only, her misery troubled no one's peace, or she did not realise that it had any outside influence; she had to fight the battle all alone, in patience, in endurance, in defiance, no softening influence, no gentle thoughts and blessed hopes to hamper or to aid her. The hard material conflict of life had been hers, and in her heart the sting of cruel mortification, of bitter disappointment, disgust, and scorn.
 
But she had borne this all alone, and had been able to bear it, had come through it somehow, and, if severely wounded, had hidden her wounds, now healed by the balm of love and happiness. But in this sorrow she did not stand alone; she had the additional misery that it had brought grief upon the man who had changed her whole life into gladness, him to whom she owed all, and more than realised every dim misgiving; she had ever felt when the idea of a second marriage presented itself.
 
She had seen Meredith and Dugdale again, after her long interview with Mr. Baldwin had come to an end--an interview full of exquisite pain to both, and yet stored among the most precious memories of their lives--and had learned all the particulars of the plan of action upon which they had decided. Then she had requested that she might be left quite alone, until her presence should be necessary in the morning. During this trying time Margaret had successfully maintained her composure, and when she left them the three men remained silent for several minutes, under the impression produced by her calmness, good sense, and self-control. Meredith was the first to break the silence.
 
"How wonderfully she has borne it!" he said. "I never hoped she would have taken it like that, though I have seen her in great trouble before, and ought to have known what she could do and bear when the screw was put on her."
 
"I have never seen her in any trouble until now," said Mr. Baldwin--there was a strange kind of pain to him in this first association with the man who had seen and helped Margaret in the time now again linked so mysteriously to the present--"she does, indeed, bear this wonderfully."
 
"I doubt whether any of us--whether even you--can tell what it is to her," said James, and there was a little impatience in his tone.
 
Who could really know what she suffered but he--he, dowered with the power of feeling and understanding grief as these two men, so different, and yet in some qualities of their organisation so alike, were not dowered?
 
The exceptional circumstances had broken down the ordinary barriers which would have shut out the subject, and the three talked over the history of Margaret's life in Australia fully and freely. Hayes Meredith told the others all he knew, and from his narrative Mr. Baldwin learnt how tolerantly, how mercifully, Margaret had dealt with the wretched man who had made her youth so miserable, and how, while telling him the simple terrible truth as she saw it, there was much she had not seen, had failed to understand. And, as he listened to the story, and thought how the ghost of the horrid past had risen up again to blight her, he felt as if all the love with which he had loved her were nothing in comparison with that which filled his heart now; and he grieved purely, unselfishly, for her, as she was then grieving for him.
 
Margaret had taken her child into her room. The nurse, weary of the journey, was nothing loth to be rid of her charge, and being an honest, stupid, bovine sort of person, and therefore admirably suited to her functions, she did not trouble her mind about her mistress's movements or remark her appearance. The little girl, already strikingly like her mother, now slept tranquilly in Margaret's arms, and now, when in the restlessness of mental suffering she could not sit still, but walked about the room, in a deep chair before the fire.
 
As the night wore on, Margaret would kneel beside the chair, and look at the child by the fire-light, and then stand up again, and resume her wandering up and down. Surely the dawn was very long in coming. She lived through those hours as probably every one in every kind of suffering lives through certain supreme hours of that experience; in alternate paroxysms of acute anguish, spells of quiet concentrated thought, and lapses of dull pain, in which there is a kind of confused forgetfulness, wanting little of being quite a blank. When the latter came, she would rock the child upon her knees before the fire, or stand idly at the window, the curtain held back in her hand, and her face pressed against the cold damp panes.
 
Memory formed a rack on which she was stretched, until her powers of endurance were almost exhausted, and when the release came, it was accompanied by the stupor which follows terrible physical pain. Every circumstance of her past life, every pain in it, from the fiercest pang to the most ignominious little insult, came up to her, and gave her a deliberate wrench, and above all, the sense of loneliness in all this, contradictory though such a feeling was to the general tenor of her thoughts, oppressed her. No one could share that trouble with her which came from the past--therein she must suffer alone.
 
Then she would force herself to think of the dead man, and what he had suffered; to realise that he had actually been living, and her husband, while she was on her voyage to England, while she was living her peaceful life at Chayleigh, while--and at this point in her thoughts she shuddered, and a deadly coldness laid hold upon her-while she had loved and married another man, had filled a high position, and enjoyed all that wealth, station, and consideration could give he............