the forehead.

"That is for your father, my dear," she said. "He never doubted you for
one moment, Owen. And this is for myself. We have both believed in you
implicitly throughout. We would not even write and tell you so. It would
have seemed, your father thought, like admitting, tacitly, that we doubted
our son. But other people believed you guilty, and oh! Owen, I think it
killed him!"

"I know that it has killed him," Owen Saxham said simply. The early
morning light showed to the mother's eyes the ravages wrought in her
son's face by the mental anguish and the physical strain of those terrible
weeks that were over, and Mrs. Saxham, for the first time since the
Squire's death, burst into a passion of weeping. Owen's eyes were dry,
even when he stooped to kiss the high, broad forehead of the grand old
grey head that lay upon the snowy, lavender-scented pillow in the cool,
airy death-chamber, where the perfume of the climbing roses that flowered
about the open casements came in drifts across the sharp, clean odour of
disinfectant.

Captain Saxham arrived late that night. His greeting of his brother was
stiff and constrained; his grey eyes avoided Owen's blue ones; he did not
refer to the events of the past ten weeks. He had always had a habit of
twisting and biting at one of the short, thick ends of his frizzy light
brown moustache. Now he wrenched and gnawed at it incessantly, and his
usually florid complexion had deteriorated to a muddy pallor. Black mufti
did not suit the handsome martial figure, and there is no dwelling so
wearisome as a house of mourning, when the servants move about on tiptoe,
wearing faces of funereal solemnity, and the afternoon tea-tray is carried
in in state, like the corpse of a domestic usage on its way to the
cemetery, with the silver spirit-kettle bubbling behind it as chief
mourner. But, as the elder son, there was plenty to occupy Captain Saxham.
There was business to be transacted with the Squire's solicitor, with his
bailiff, with one or two of the principal tenants. There were the
arrangements to be made for the Funeral, and for the extension of
hospitality to relatives and friends who came from a distance to attend
it. When it was over and the long string of County carriages had driven
home to their respective coach-houses, Owen Saxham returned to town.

"Give my dear love to Mildred. Tell her, if she grudged the first sight of
you to me, she will forgive me when she has a son of