It was high June, in leafy England, in a world at peace.  Can one picture it?  With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of tender childhood.  In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea Fenimore.  She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother, modern, with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness and sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call “open-air”; yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies.  I have seen her in the morning tearing away across country by the side of her father, the most passionate and reckless rider to hounds in the county, and in the evening I have come across her, a pretty mass of pink flesh and muslin—­no, it can’t be muslin—­say chiffon—­anyhow, something white and filmy and girlish—­curled up on a sofa and absorbed in a novel of Mrs. Henry Wood, borrowed, if one could judge by the state of its greasy brown paper cover, from the servants’ hall.  I confess that, though to her as to her brother I was “Uncle Duncan,” and loved her as a dear, sweet English girl, I found her lacking in spirituality, in intellectual grasp, in emotional distinction.  I should have said that she was sealed by God to be the chaste, healthy, placid mother of men.  She was forever laughing—­just the spontaneous laughter of the gladness of life.

On the last afternoon of her existence she came to see me, bringing me a basket of giant strawberries from her own particular bed.  We had tea in the garden, and with her young appetite she consumed half the fruit she had brought.  At the time I did not notice an unusual touch of depression.  I remember her holding by its stalk a great half-eaten strawberry and asking me whether sometimes I didn’t find life rather rotten.  I said idly: 

“You can’t expect the world to be a peach without a speck on it.  Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.  The wise person avoids the specks.”

“But suppose you’ve bitten a specky bit by accident?”

“Spit it out,” said I.

She laughed.  “You think you’re like the wise Uncle in the Sunday School books, don’t you?”

“I know I am,” I said.

Whereupon she laughed again, finished the strawberry, and changed the conversation.

There seemed to be no foreshadowing of tragedy in that.  I had known her (like many of her kind) to proclaim the rottenness of the Universe when she was off her stroke at golf, or when a favourite young man did not appear at a dance.  I attributed no importance to it.  But the next day I remembered.  What was she doing after half-past ten o’clock, when she had bidden her father and mother goodnight, on the steep and lonely bank of the canal, about a mile and a half away?  No one had seen her leave the house.  No one, apparently, had seen her walking through the town.  Nothing was known of her until dawn when they found her body by the lock gate.  She had been dead some hours.  It was a mysterious affair, upon which no light was thrown at the inquest.