The finality of the affair, according to Nina, was what had seemed to her the most distressing—­as though those two were already dead people.  She was unable to understand it.  Could no glimmer of hope remain that, in that magic “some day” of all young minds, the evil mystery might dissolve?  Could there be no living “happily ever after” in the wake of such a storm?  She had managed to hope for that, and believe in it.

Then, in some way, the news of Alixe’s marriage to Ruthven filtered through the family silence.  She had gone straight to Nina, horrified, unbelieving.  And, when the long, tender, intimate interview was over, another unhappy truth, very gently revealed, was added to the growing list already learned by this young girl.

Then Selwyn came.  She had already learned something of the world’s customs and manners before his advent; she had learned more since his advent; and she was learning something else, too—­to understand how happily ignorant of many matters she had been, had better be, and had best remain.  And she harboured no malsane desire to know more than was necessary, and every innocent instinct to preserve her ignorance intact as long as the world permitted.

As for the man riding there at her side, his problem was simple enough as he summed it up:  to face the world, however it might chance to spin, that small, ridiculous, haphazard world rattling like a rickety roulette ball among the numbered nights and days where he had no longer any vital stake at hazard—­no longer any chance to win or lose.

This was an unstable state of mind, particularly as he had not yet destroyed the photograph which he kept locked in his despatch box.  He had not returned it, either; it was too late by several months to do that, but he was still fool enough to consider the idea at moments—­sometimes after a nursery romp with the children, or after a good-night kiss from Drina on the lamp-lit landing, or when some commonplace episode of the domesticity around him hurt him, cutting him to the quick with its very simplicity, as when Nina’s hand fell naturally into Austin’s on their way to “lean over” the children at bedtime, or their frank absorption in conjugal discussion to his own exclusion as he sat brooding by the embers in the library.

“I’m like a dead man at times,” he said to himself; “nothing to expect of a man who is done for; and worst of all, I no longer expect anything of myself.”

This was sufficiently morbid, and he usually proved it by going early to his own quarters, where dawn sometimes surprised him asleep in his chair, white and worn, all the youth in his hollow face extinct, his wife’s picture fallen face downward on the floor.

But he always picked it up again when he awoke, and carefully dusted it, too, even when half stupefied with sleep.

* * * * *