evident that he had misgivings and fears. I tried to reason him
out of them. He did not, I am thankful to say, ever let Mary suspect
them. She had no misgivings. But it was destined that her child should
live only for an hour, and that she should die in bearing it.

I had stayed again at the cottage in July, for some days. At the end of
that month I had gone to France, as was my custom, and a week later had
written to Mary. It was William that answered this letter, telling me of
Mary's death and burial. I returned to England next day. William and I
wrote to each other several times. He had not left his home. He stayed
there, 'trying,' as he said in a grotesque and heart-rending phrase, 'to
finish a novel.' I saw him in the following January. He wrote to me from
the Charing Cross Hotel, asking me to lunch with him there. After our
first greetings, there was a silence. He wanted to talk of--what he
could not talk of. We stared helplessly at each other, and then, in the
English way, talked of things at large. England was engaged in the Boer
War. William was the sort of man whom one would have expected to be
violently Pro-Boer. I was surprised at his fervour for the stronger
side. He told me he had tried to enlist, but had been rejected on
account of his eyesight. But there was, he said, a good chance of his
being sent out, almost immediately, as one of the Daily --'s special
correspondents. 'And then,' he exclaimed, 'I shall see something of it.'
I had a presentiment that he would not return, and a belief that he did
not want to return. He did not return. Special correspondents were not
so carefully shepherded in that war as they have since been. They were
more at liberty to take risks, on behalf of the journals to which they
were accredited. William was killed a few weeks after he had landed at
Cape Town.

And there came, as I have said, a time when I did not think of William
and Mary often; and then a time when I did more often think of them. And
especially much did my mind hark back to them in the late autumn of
last year; for on the way to the place I was staying at I had passed the
little railway station whose name had always linked itself for me
with the names of those two friends. There were but four intervening
stations. It was not a difficult pilgrimage that I made some days
later--back towards the past, for that past's sake and honour. I had
thought I should not remember the way, the three miles of way, from the