(I think she did it on
purpose to screen him) by getting up and going out softly into the
porch of the inn.

Burton followed her there.

You forgive many things to Burton. I have had to forgive his cutting
me out with Antigone. He _says_ that they talked about nothing but
Ford Lankester out there, and certainly as I joined them I heard
Antigone saying again, "I oughtn't to have come. I only came because
I adored him." I heard Burton say, "And you never knew him?" and
Antigone, "No, how _could_ I?"

And then I saw him give it back to her with his young radiance.
"It's a pity. He would have adored _you_."

He always says it was Ford Lankester that did it.

The next thing Furnival's article came out. Charles Wrackham's name
was in it all right, and poor Antigone's. I'm sure it made her sick
to see it there. Furny had been very solemn and decorous in his
article; but in private his profanity was awful. He said it only
remained now for Charles Wrackham to die.

II

He didn't die. Not then, not all at once. He had an illness
afterward that sent his circulation up to I don't know what, but he
didn't die of it. He knew his business far too well to die then. We
had five blessed years of him. Nor could we have done with less.
Words can't describe the joy he was to us, nor what he would have
been but for Antigone.

I ought to tell you that he recovered his spirits wonderfully on our
way back from Chenies. He had mistaken our attentions to Antigone
for interest in _him_, and he began to unbend, to unfold himself, to
expand gloriously. It was as if he felt that the removal of Ford
Lankester had left him room.

He proposed that Burton and I should make a pilgrimage some day to
Wildweather Hall. He called it a pilgrimage--to the shrine, you
understand.

Well, we made it. We used to make many pilgrimages, but Burton made
more than I.

The Sacred Place, you remember, was down in East Devon. He'd built
himself a modern Tudor mansion--if you know what that is--there and
ruined the most glorious bit of the coast between Seaton and
Sidmouth. It stood at the head of a combe looking to the sea. They'd
used old stone for the enormous front of it, and really, if he'd
stuck it anywhere else, it might have been rather fine. But it was
much too large for the combe. Why, when all the lights were lit in
it you could see it miles out to sea, twinkling away like the line
of the Brighton Parade. It was one immense advertisement of Ch