he would."

She lay back again. Her face was suddenly pinched and grey, but she felt
not the smallest desire to cry.

"I wonder why!" she presently said. "How I wonder why!"

Mrs. Langdale recovered herself with an effort. The frozen voice seemed
to give her strength.

"Have we any right to ask that?" she whispered. "No one on this side can
ever know."

"Oh, I think you are wrong," Molly said. "We can't be meant to grope in
outer darkness."

Mrs. Langdale whispered something about "those the gods love." She was
too broken-down herself to be able to offer any solid comfort.

After a painful silence she got up and busied herself with reviving
Molly's fire, which had almost gone out. She felt as she had felt only
once before in her life, and that had been ten years previously, when
her only child had died suddenly. She wished passionately that she were
back in Calcutta with her husband. She hated the bleak English winter,
the cruel English seas.

Molly lay quite still for some time, her young face drawn and stricken.

At length she got up and went to the window. It was a morning of bleak
winds and shifting clouds. The sea was just visible, very far and dim
and grey. She stood a long while gazing stonily out.

"Can I get you anything, darling?" said Mrs. Langdale's voice softly
behind her.

"No, thank you," the girl said, without turning. "Please leave me;
that's all!"

And Mrs. Langdale crept away through the hushed house to her own
apartment, there to lay down her head and cry herself exhausted. Dear,
gallant Charlie! Her heart ached for him. His irrepressible gaiety, his
reckless generosity, these had become the attributes of a hero for ever
in her eyes.

After a while her hostess came to her, pale and tearful, to beg her, if
she possibly could, to show herself at the breakfast table. Captain
Fisher had repeatedly asked for her, she said; and he seemed very
uneasy.

Mrs. Langdale rose, washed her face, and made an effort to powder away
the evidence of her grief. Then she went bravely down and faced the
silent crowd in the breakfast room. No one was eating anything. The very
air smote chill and cheerless as she entered. As if he had been lying in
wait for her, Fisher pounced upon her on the threshold.

"I must speak to you for a moment," he said. "Come into the
smoking-room!"

Mrs. Langdale accompanied him without a word.

"How is she?" he demanded, almost before they entered. "How did she take
it