boy. It's
all too new to me, and I tell you I can't understand it."

He trailed off with a slow and stricken movement, like a lesser
Lear, and reentered the house by the window of Frida's room. The
sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his
sense of her desertion.

"Look at that. She was my right hand, Maurice, and I can't realize
that she's gone. It's the queerest sensation; I feel as if she was
here and yet wasn't here."

Durant said he had heard that people felt like that after the
amputation of their right hands. As for the wound, he hoped that
time would heal it.

"Any soldier can tell you that old wounds will still bleed, Durant.
I think that was the luncheon bell."

Lunch, over which the Colonel lingered lovingly and long, somewhat
obscured the freshness of the tragedy, and made it a thing of the
remoter past. An hour later he was playing with his little
rain-gauge on the lawn. At afternoon teatime he appeared
immaculately attired in the height of the fashion; brown boots, the
palest of pale gray summer suitings, a white pique waistcoat, the
least little luminous hint of green in his silk necktie, and he
seemed the spirit of youth incarnate.

At this figure Durant smiled with a pity that was only two-thirds
contempt. He longed to ask him whether the old wound was bleeding
badly. He was bound to believe that the Colonel had a heart under
his immaculate waistcoat, with pulses and arteries the same as other
people's, his own unconquerable conviction being that if you pricked
the gentlemannikin he would bleed sawdust.

The Colonel had scarcely swallowed his tea when Durant saw him
trotting off in the direction of the cottage; there was that about
him which, considering his recent bereavement, suggested an almost
indecent haste. He returned and sat down to dinner, flushed but
uncommunicative. He seemed aware that it was Durant's last night,
and it was after some weak attempts to give the meal a commemorative
and farewell character, half-festal, half-funereal, that he sank
into silence, and remained brooding over the ice pudding in his
attitude of owl-like inscrutability. But during the privacy of
dessert his mystic mood took flight; he hopped, as it were, onto a
higher perch; he stretched the wing of victory and gazed at it
admiringly; there was an effect as of the preening of young plumage,
the fluttering of innumerable feathers.

And, with champagne running in his veins like the