so much younger than when she had known him.  Why send it to her now?  What had she to do with this remote past?  But the paper was the most astonishing of all.  She had been standing when she undid the things; she left the ring and the photograph on the table, and she sank into a chair near the fire holding the bit of paper.  The tone of it astonished and confused her.  It was more the stern moralist asking to be forgiven for doing right than the guilty husband asking for mercy in her thoughts of him.

“Yes,” thought Rose at length, “that is because she was his wife, and when he came to face death it was the great wrong of infidelity to her that haunted him.  I must have seemed almost a partner in the wrong.”

Again the confused sense of guilt seized her, the horrible possibility of having been a wife only in name.  She did not weigh the matter calmly enough to feel quite as distinctly as she ought to have done that she could not be touched or denied in the faintest degree by a sin that was not her sin.  Still she raised her head as she could not have done some weeks before; for the most acute phase of her trial had been faced and had been passed.  Now in her moments of most bitter pain in the very depths of her soul was peace.  As she became calmer she tried again to connect together those three parts of the message from the battle-field, the ring, the photograph, and the letter; but she could not do so.  At last she put them away in the drawer of her bureau, and then wrote to tell her mother and the lawyer that Sir David had sent her a photograph, a ring, and a few private lines—­that was all.  There was no will.

Still everything had not been brought back.  There had been portmanteaux sent down to Capetown, and there might yet be discovered a small despatch box, or a writing case, something or other that might hold a will.  But the limit of time was reached at last; the portmanteaux and a despatch box were recovered, but they held no will.

The solicitor delayed to the last possible moment, and then the will was proved.  It was published in the papers at a moment when a lull in the war gave leisure for private gossip, and the gossip accordingly raged hotly.  All the sweetness, gentleness, and kindness that made Rose deservedly popular did not prevent there being two currents of opinion.  There are wits so active that they cannot share the views of all right-minded people.  While the majority sympathised deeply with Rose, there were a few who insinuated that she must be to some degree to blame for what had happened.

“Well, don’t you know, I never could understand why she married a man so much older than herself.  Of course she had not a penny and he was awfully rich, and people don’t look too close into a man’s character in such cases.  It is rather convenient for some women to be very innocent.”

Sir Edmund Grosse, to whom the remark was addressed at a small country house party, turned his back for a moment on the speaker in order to pick up a paper, and then said in a low, indifferent voice:  “David Bright came into his cousin’s fortune unexpectedly a year after he married Lady Rose.”