* * * * * * The dawn of another day crept silently over the Devon hill-tops as Lady Kingsland arose from her husband's deathbed.
White, and stark, and rigid, the late lord of Kingsland Court lay in the awful majesty of death.
The doctor, the rector, the nurse, sat, pale and somber watchers, in the death-room. More than an hour before the youthful baronet had been sent to his room, worn out with his night's watching.
It was the Reverend Cyrus Green who urged my lady now to follow him.
"You look utterly exhausted, my dear Lady Kingsland," he said. "Pray retire and endeavor to sleep. You are not able to endure such fatigue."
"I am worn out," she said. "I believe I will lie down, but I feel as though I should never sleep again."
She quitted the room, but not to seek her own. Outside the death-chamber she paused an instant, and her face lighted suddenly.
"Now is my time," she said, under her breath. "A few hours more and it may be too late. His safe, he said--the secret spring!"
She flitted away, pallid and guilty looking, into Sir Jasper's study. It was deserted, of course, and there in the corner stood the grim iron safe.
"Now for the secrets of the dead! No fortune-telling jugglery shall blight my darling boy's life while I can help it. He is as superstitious as his father."
With considerable difficulty she opened the safe, pulled forth drawer after drawer, until the grim iron back was exposed.
"The secret spring is here," she muttered. "Surely, surely, I can find it."
For many minutes she searched in vain; then her glance fell on a tiny steel knob inserted in a corner. She pressed this with all her might, confident of success.
Nor was she deceived; the knob moved, the iron slid slowly back, disclosing a tiny hidden drawer.
Lady Kingsland barely repressed a cry as she saw the paper, and by its side something wrapped in silver tissue. Greedily she snatched both out, pressed back the knob, locked the safe, stole out of the study and up to her own room.
Panting with her haste, my lady sunk into a seat, with her treasures eagerly clutched. A moment recovered her; then she took up the little parcel wrapped in the silver paper.
"He said nothing of this," she thought. "What can it be?"
She tore off the wrapping. As it fell to the floor, a long tress of silky black hair fell with it, and she held in her hand a miniature painted on ivory. A girlish face of exquisite beauty, dusky as the face of an Indian queen, looked up at her, fresh and bright as thirty years before. No need to look at the words on the reverse--"My peerless Zenith"--to know who it was; the wife's jealousy told her at the first glance.