ld have told
me," she said.

"You know," she added, "I don't believe it yet. I don't realize it. I go
about these formalities--"

"I think I can understand that."

"He was always, you know, not quite here.... It is as if he were a
little more not quite here.... I can't believe it is over...."

She asked a number of questions and took the doctor's advice upon
various details of the arrangements. "My daughter Helen comes home
to-morrow afternoon," she explained. "She is in Paris. But our son is
far, far away in the Punjab. I have sent him a telegram.... It is so
kind of you to come in to me."

Dr. Martineau went more than half way to meet Lady Hardy's disposition
to treat him as a friend of the family. He had conceived a curious, half
maternal affection for Sir Richmond that had survived even the trying
incident of the Salisbury parting and revived very rapidly during the
last few weeks. This affection extended itself now to Lady Hardy. Hers
was a type that had always appealed to him. He could understand so well
the perplexed loyalty with which she was now setting herself to gather
together some preservative and reassuring evidences of this man who had
always been; as she put it, "never quite here." It was as if she felt
that now it was at last possible to make a definite reality of him. He
could be fixed. And as he was fixed he would stay. Never more would he
be able to come in and with an almost expressionless glance wither the
interpretation she had imposed upon him. She was finding much comfort
in this task of reconstruction. She had gathered together in the
drawingroom every presentable portrait she had been able to find of him.
He had never, she said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil
sketch done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a
number of photographs, several of which--she wanted the doctor's advice
upon this point--she thought might be enlarged; there was a statuette
done by some woman artist who had once beguiled him into a sitting.
There was also a painting she had had worked up from a photograph and
some notes. She flitted among these memorials, going from one to the
other, undecided which to make the standard portrait. "That painting,
I think, is most like," she said: "as he was before the war. But the war
and the Commission changed him,--worried him and aged him.... I grudged
him to that Commission. He let it worry him frightfully."

"It meant very much to him," said