he said with an abstracted sort of
formality. For he'd caught me on the wing, half-way back from the open
window, where I'd been glancing out to make sure Struthers was on
guard with the children.

My face was a question, I suppose, even when I didn't speak.

"There's something I want you to be very quiet and courageous about,"
was my husband's none too tranquillizing beginning. And I could feel
my pulse quicken.

"What is it?" I asked, wondering just what women should do to make
themselves quiet and courageous.

"It's about Allie," answered my husband, speaking so slowly and
deliberately that it sounded unnatural. "She shot herself last night.
She--she killed herself, with an army revolver she'd borrowed from a
young officer down there."

I couldn't quite understand, at first. The words seemed like
half-drowned things my mind had to work over and resuscitate and coax,
back into life.

"This is terrible!" I said at last, feebly, foolishly, as the meaning
of it all filtered through my none too active brain.

"It's terrible for me," acknowledged Dinky-Dunk, with a self-pity
which I wasn't slow to resent.

"But why aren't you there?" I demanded. "Why aren't you there to keep
a little decency about the thing? Why aren't you looking after what's
left of her?"

Dinky-Dunk's eye evaded mine, but only for a moment.

"Colonel Ainsley-Brook is coming back from Washington to take
possession of the remains," he explained with a sort of dry-lipped
patience, "and take them home."

"But why should an outsider like--"

Dinky-Dunk stopped me with a gesture.

"He and Allie were married, a little over three weeks ago," my husband
quietly informed me. And for the second time I had to work life into
what seemed limp and sodden words.

"Did you know about that?" I asked.

"Yes, Allie wrote to me about it, at the time," he replied with a sort
of coerced candor. "She said it seemed about the only thing left to
do."

"Why should she say that?"

Dinky-Dunk stared at me with something strangely like a pleading look
in his haggard eye.

"Wouldn't it be better to keep away from all that, at a time like
this?" he finally asked.

"No," I told him, "this is the time we _can't_ keep away from it. She
wrote you that because she was in love with you. Isn't that the
truth?"

Dinky-Dunk raised his hand, as though he were attempting a movement of
protest, and then dropped it again. His eyes, I noticed, were luminous
with a sor