'I am not going to get over my illness this time,' she reiterated.

'Something tells me I shan't.' This view of things was rather a bad beginning, as it usually is; and, in fact, six weeks later, in the month of May, she was lying in her room, pulseless and bloodless, with hardly strength enough left to follow up one feeble breath with another, the infant for whose unnecessary life she was slowly parting with her own being fat and well.

Just before her death she spoke to Marchmill softly:- 'Will, I want to confess to you the entire circumstances of that--about you know what--that time we visited Solentsea.

I can't tell what possessed me--how I could forget you so, my husband! But I had got into a morbid state: I thought you had been unkind; that you had neglected me; that you weren't up to my intellectual level, while he was, and far above it.

I wanted a fuller appreciator, perhaps, rather than another lover--' She could get no further then for very exhaustion; and she went off in sudden collapse a few hours later, without having said anything more to her husband on the subject of her love for the poet.