"Jani," said her mistress, "bring me Captain English's box!"

The ayah stared as if she could not have heard aright. There followed a strange oppressive silence, in which the lapping of the waters in the inner marble spaces seemed to take whispering voices of amazement. Then Lady Gerardine, standing straight and impassive by her dressing-table, her head just turned aside from the reflection of her own beauty, repeated her order in the same hard, uninflected tone.

"Captain English's box; bring it to me."

Jani looked sharply up at the speaker's face and clapped her hands together with the wail of the children of her race when sudden trouble comes upon them.

"Ai, ai!"

"Go," said Lady Gerardine.

Grudgingly Jani turned to obey. She went, muttering to herself, groping in her soul for the reason of this strange and most unexpected order—an order so out of keeping with the whole tenor of her mistress's life, that it rang in her ears like a menace of calamity.

*      *      *      *      *

It was a small thing enough, a common battered tin box, to rank with such importance. But it held tragedy: more than tragedy, a woman's murdered youth. Well did Jani remember the day it had come back to the little home, up in the hills—all that was left to them of their handsome young lord. They could not carry Rosamond back her dead; what soldier's widow can hope for that last tragic comfort? But the few tangible traces he had left behind him; these were hers by right, and to her they were brought, with scarcely less reverence than if they had been his honoured remains—the journal he had kept for her during yonder endless months of siege; the letters he had written her, never to post; his notes; sundry trifling belongings, marked with that poignant personal touch which seems to inflict the hardest pain of all.

One can kneel in uplifted resignation beside the awful grandeur of the soul-abandoned clay. But the old pipe, burned down on one side, the worn glove ... over these trivial relics the heart breaks. Rosamond English, in her nausea of misery, her rebellion against the unaccepted unrealisable sorrow, could not look at them, could not touch the poor memorials. She thrust them back into the battered box away from her sight, and with them all the garnered treasures of her brief girlhood and of her briefer wifehood: the simple keepsake, the dried flowers—sprig from her wedding bouquet, bridal wreath—the letters to the betrothed, the first letters to the wife. Things of no worth, yet full of hideous potentialities of grief: symbols of what had been, what might have been. "Away, away with them!" cried her sick heart, "out of my sight for ever!"

And now she was to break open the coffin to look upon the horror of the murdered thing that was her youth; she who had nailed it down so fast, buried it so deep!

Jani laid the box at her mistress's feet and loosened the cords slow............