painfully
that, if they had but known more, something might have been done for her.
The burden of a secret lies in the sense of loneliness which it brings.
A unique experience, dissimilarity of thought or knowledge that is not
shared by others, makes a solitude with which no bodily isolation can be
compared. Only one person knew--only one person had ever known: that
seemed the intolerable thing to the two persons left behind to wonder
what the message could mean.

'I sometimes wish she had been a Catholic,' Peter once said. 'It might
have been some sort of comfort to her.'

Mrs. Ogilvie was a woman who could remain silent always, and perhaps it
was the supreme effort involved by breaking through a lifetime of reserve
that, in its added strain upon her heart, had caused her death.

The last few days that the lovers had together were spent in a very loyal
and affectionate endeavour to make each other as happy as possible. They
made no professions of love or confidence, nor ever dreamed of promising
to be true, because they never for a moment could admit the possibility
of being anything else; and they did not even promise to write to each
other, or to say their prayers at the same time every evening--the
difficulty of calculating the difference between Greenwich and local time
on a westward voyage put a stop to anything of that sort. Nor did they
talk of remembering each other as they looked at the stars; but they
spoke of the future and of all the good things it was going to bring, and
they even laughed sometimes over imaginary portraits of the brother whom
Peter was to seek, and they told each other ridiculous little tales of
what he would be like and what he would say and do.

One afternoon Jane gave Peter a gold cigarette case as a parting gift,
with his name scrawled in her big handwriting across it; while Peter
presented his fiancee with a very handsome diamond ring, and forgot
altogether that perhaps he could not pay for it, and went back and told
the jeweller so. The jeweller, having known Captain Ogilvie all his
life, and being aware that he had lately succeeded to an immense
property, thought the young man was joking, and said it did not matter in
the least.

Then came the day of parting--drizzly, wet, and depressing--just such a
day as people always seem to choose on which to leave England; there was
the usual routine of departure; the 'special' from Waterloo, the crowd at
the station, the plethora of