"When did you see her last?" he asked.

"I saw her last driving on the sea front at San Remo. If you could
call it seeing her. She was all huddled up in furs and rugs and
things. Just a sharp white slip of a face and two eyes gazing at
nothing out of the carriage window. She looked as if something had
scared her."

And it was of her that he had been afraid!

"Do you know," he said presently, "what she died of?"

"No. It was supposed that, some time or other, she must have had
some great shock."

Caldecott shifted his position.

"The doctors said there was no reason why she should have died. She
could have lived well enough if she had wanted to. The terrible
thing was that she didn't want. If you ask me what she died of I
should say she was either scared to death or starved."

"Surely," he said, "surely she had enough?"

"Oh, she had food enough to eat, and clothes enough to cover her,
and fire enough to warm her. But she starved."

"What do you suppose," said Julia, "the poor girl wanted?"

"Nothing, my dear, that you would understand."

He was at a loss to account for the asperity of the little lady's
tone; but he remembered that Julia had never been a favorite with
her aunt.

"I'm convinced," said Mrs. Dysart, "that woman died for want of
something. Something that she'd got used to till it was absolutely
necessary to her. Something, whatever it was, that had completely
satisfied her. When she found herself without it, _that_, I imagine,
constituted the shock. And she wasn't strong enough to stand it,
that was all."

Mrs. Dysart spoke to her niece, but he felt that there was something
in her, fiery and indignant, that hurled itself across Julia at him.

He changed the subject.

"She--she left nothing?"

"Not a note, not a line."

"Ah, well, what we have is beautiful enough for anybody."

"I wonder if you have any idea what you might have had? If you even
knew what it was you had?"

"I never presumed," he said, "to understand her. I've hardly ever
known any woman properly but one."

"And knowing one woman--properly or improperly--won't help you to
understand another. _I_ never knew there was so much in her."

"She didn't know it herself. She used to say it wasn't in her. It
was the most mysterious thing I ever saw."

It was his turn to shelter himself behind Freda's gift. He piled up
words, and his mind cowered behind them, thinking no thought,
seeing nothing but Freda's dead face with its