No one save myself had observed any sign of depression, and her half-bantering talk with me was trivial enough.  No one could adduce a reason for her midnight walk on the tow-path.  The obvious question arose.  Whom had she gone forth to meet?  What man?  There was not a man in the neighbourhood with whom her name could be particularly associated.  Generally, it could be associated with a score or so.  The modern young girl of her position and upbringing has a drove of young male intimates.  With one she rides, with another she golfs, with another she dances a two-step, with another she Bostons; she will let Tom read poetry to her, although, as she expresses it, “he bores her stiff,” because her sex responds to the tribute; she plays lady patroness to Dick, and tries to intrigue him into a soft job; and as for Harry she goes on telling him month after month that unless he forswears sack and lives cleanly she will visit him with her high displeasure.  Meanwhile, most of these satellites have affaires de coeur of their own, some respectable, others not; they regard the young lady with engaging frankness as a woman and a sister, they have the run of her father’s house, and would feel insulted if anybody questioned the perfect correctness of their behaviour.  Each man has, say, half a dozen houses where he is welcomed on the same understanding.  Of course, when one particular young man and one particular young woman read lunatic things in each other’s eyes, then the rest of the respective quasi-sisters and quasi-brothers have to go hang. (In parenthesis, I may state that the sisters are more ruthlessly sacrificed than the brothers.) At any rate, frankness is the saving quality of the modern note.

In the case of Althea, there had been no sign of such specialisation.  She could not have gone forth, poor child, to meet the twenty with whom she was known to be on terms of careless comradeship.  She had gone from her home, driven by God knows what impulse, to walk in the starlight—­there was no moon—­along the banks of the canal.  In the darkness, had she missed her footing and stepped into nothingness and the black water?  The Coroner’s Jury decided the question in the affirmative.  They brought in a verdict of death by misadventure.  And up to the date on which I begin this little Chronicle of Wellingsford, namely that of the summons to Wellings Park, when I heard of the death of young Oswald Fenimore, that is all I knew of the matter.

Throughout July my friends were like dead people.  There was nothing that could be said to them by way of consolation.  The sun had gone out of their heaven.  There was no light in the world.  Having known Death as a familiar foe, and having fought against its terrors; having only by the grace of God been able to lift up a man’s voice in my hour of awful bereavement, and cry, “O Death, where is thy sting, O Grave, thy Victory?” I could suffer with them and fear for their reason.  They lived in a state of coma, unaware of life, performing, like automata, their daily tasks.