owring's case. She
could remember everything and everybody in her life. But her father was
not in her memories, and there was a little motionless grey cloud in
the place where he should have been. He had been a soldier, and had been
killed in an obscure skirmish with black men, in one of England's
obscure but expensive little wars. Death is always very much the same
thing, and it seems unfair that the guns of Balaclava should still roar
"glory" while the black man's quick spear-thrust only spells "dead,"
without comment. But glory in death is even more a matter of luck than
fame in life. At all events, Captain Bowring, as brave a gentleman as
ever faced fire, had perished like so many other brave gentlemen of his
kind, in a quiet way, without any fuss, beyond killing half a dozen or
so of his assailants, and had left his widow the glory of receiving a
small pension in return for his blood, and that was all. Some day, when
the dead are reckoned, and the manner of their death noted, poor Bowring
may count for more than some of his friends who died at home from a
constitutional inability to enjoy all the good things fortune set before
them, complicated by a disposition incapable of being satisfied with
only a part of the feast. But at the time of this tale they counted for
more than he; for they had been constrained to leave behind them what
they could not consume, while he, poor man, had left very little besides
the aforesaid interest in the investment of his blood, in the form of a
pension to his widow, and the small grey cloud in the memory of his
girl-child, in the place where he should have been. For he had been
killed when she had been a baby.

The mother and daughter were lonely, if not alone in the world; for when
one has no money to speak of, and no relations at all, the world is a
lonely place, regarded from the ordinary point of view--which is, of
course, the true one. They had no home in England, and they generally
lived abroad, more or less, in one or another of the places of society's
departed spirits, such as Florence. They had not, however, entered into
Limbo without hope, since they were able to return to the social earth
when they pleased, and to be alive again, and the people they met abroad
sometimes asked them to stop with them at home, recognising the fact
that they were still socially living and casting shadows. They were sure
of half a hundred friendly faces in London and of half a dozen
hospitable