Bridgminster was also dead; and on the day following Mabel’s funeral, Ordham, in company with his mother and two of his brothers, started for Scotland to escort the body of the late head of their house to Ordham Castle and bury him in the vault beneath the village church with his fathers.

Ordham had endeavoured to forget Margarethe Styr until the last rites had been paid to his wife, but he sent her a telegram as he was leaving London, several from Scotland, and another as soon as he arrived at the castle. When his brother’s funeral was over, his relatives departed, and he was quite alone—certain matters necessary of adjustment detained him at Ordham for a few days—he sat down to write a long impassioned letter to her. But his pen fell from his hand. For the first time in his life he could have written a great love-letter, abandoned himself recklessly in words; but he knew that if he made no mention of marriage, Styr, even if she received the letter in a state of mind absolutely responsive—by no means certain!—would notice the omission. She loved him as profoundly as a woman is capable of loving; the terrible confession by which she purposed to save him was proof enough of that; but she was also clear-sighted and practical. No subtlety of omission would ever deceive her, and all arguments against the public relation should come from her; that was her right. It was not that he had the least doubt she would continue to make these protests that held his pen, but the doubt of his own sincerity did he protest in black and white that he intended to marry her. Not only did this woman still magnetize all the truth that was in him, but he knew that he could not make that particular protest as strong as the rest of his letter; she would detect the difference, and, with feminine inconsistency, be wounded to the quick.

And although he loved her the more for the pity that melted him every time he thought of that past she was forced to crowd out of her memory would she live at all, and admired her increasingly that she had risen to such triumphant heights of character and fortune above that Paphian ruin, he was appalled at the thought of introducing her into the line of mothers of the house of Ordham. If Mabel’s boy had only lived! Or if he could be sure that Styr would have no children. But to have his possible sons and daughters cower from their fellows under the knowledge that their mother had been a woman of the streets—he was no longer young and indolent enough, careless and arrogant enough, to quaff his goblet to the dregs with no thought of the morrow.

If Styr had been one of the world’s great singers for twenty years, that would be quite another matter. Ugly facts disappear into the alembic of Fame to emerge picturesque fiction. In course of time history would relate that one of the Countesses of Bridgminster had been a famous prima donna, her descendants would point with pride to her pictures by Lenbach and Sargent in the gallery of Ordham. But Munich was not the world, and although Styr had triumphed briefly in London, it was as a “discovery,” not as a prima donna of established fame. Nor had she more than a year left in which to make a world-wide reputation, for she must leave the stage if she married him. He knew that he should win on this point, if he was able to overcome her scruples and marry her at all; but the result would be, as she well knew............