"but there it is. It is no use
looking backward, we must look forward."

"Yes, look forward, both of us, since she is hidden from both. You see,
almost from the first I knew you were fond of her," added the clergyman
simply.

"Yes," he answered, "I am fond of her, though of that the less said the
better, and because our case is the same I hope that we shall always be
friends."

"You are very kind; I shall need a friend now. I am alone now, quite
alone, and my heart is broken."

Here it may be added that Morris was even better than his word. Out of
the wealth that came to him in such plenty, for instance, he was careful
to augment the old man's resources without offending his feelings, by
adding permanently and largely to the endowment of the living. Also, he
attended to his wants in many other ways which need not be enumerated,
and not least by constantly visiting him. Many were the odd hours and
the evenings that shall be told of later, which they spent together
smoking their pipes in the Rectory study, and talking of her who had
gone, and whose lost life was the strongest link between them. Otherwise
and elsewhere, except upon a few extraordinary occasions, her name
rarely passed the lips of Morris.

Yet within himself he mourned and mourned, although even in the first
bitterness not as one without hope. He knew that she had spoken truth;
that she was not dead, but only for a while out of his sight and
hearing.

Ten days had passed, and for Morris ten weary, almost sleepless, nights.
The tragedy of the destruction of the new rector's daughter in the ruins
of the Dead Church no longer occupied the tongues of men and paragraphs
in papers. One day the sea gave up the hood of her brown ulster, the
same that Morris had been seen arranging by Stephen and Eliza Layard; it
was found upon the beach. After this even the local police admitted that
the conjectures as to her end must be true, and, since for the lack
of anything to hold it on there could be no inquest, the excitement
dwindled and died. Nor indeed, as her father announced that he was
quite satisfied as to the circumstances of his daughter's death, was
any formal inquiry held concerning them. A few people, however, still
believed that she was not really drowned but had gone away secretly for
unknown private reasons. The world remembers few people, even if they
be distinguished, for ten whole days. It has not time for such
long-continued recollection of t