It was summer-time, six months later, and mowers and haymakers were at work in the meads.  The manor-house, being opposite them, frequently formed a for conversation during these operations; and the doings of the , and the squire’s young wife, the curate’s sister—who was at present the admired of most of them, and the interest of all—met with their due amount of criticism.  
Rosa was happy, if ever woman could be said to be so.  She had not learnt the fate of her father, and sometimes wondered—perhaps with a sense of relief—why he did not write to her from his supposed home in Canada.  Her brother Joshua had been presented to a living in a small town, shortly after her marriage, and Cornelius had thereupon succeeded to the vacant curacy of Narrobourne.
 
These two had awaited in deep the discovery of their father’s body; and yet the discovery had not been made.  Every day they expected a man or a boy to run up from the meads with the intelligence; but he had never come.  Days had accumulated to weeks and months; the wedding had come and gone: Joshua had and read himself in at his new parish; and never a shout of over the millwright’s .
 
But now, in June, when they were the meads, the hatches had to be and the water let out of its channels for the convenience of the mowers.  It was thus that the discovery was made.  A man, stooping low with his , caught a view of the culvert lengthwise, and saw something in the recently bared weeds of its bed.  A day or two after there was an inquest; but the body was unrecognizable.  Fish and flood had been busy with the millwright; he had no watch or marked article which could be identified; and a verdict of the accidental drowning of a person unknown settled the matter.
 
As the body was found in Narrobourne parish, there it had to be buried.  Cornelius wrote to Joshua, begging him to come and read the service, or to send some one; he himself could not do it.  Rather than let in a stranger Joshua came, and silently scanned the coroner’s order handed him by the undertaker:—
 
‘I, Henry Giles, Coroner for the Mid-Division of Outer Wessex, do hereby order the Burial of the Body now shown to the Inquest Jury as the Body of an Adult Male Person Unknown . . . ,’ etc.
 
Joshua Halborough got through the service in some way, and rejoined his brother Cornelius at his house.  Neither accepted an invitation to lunch at their sister’s; they wished to discuss parish matters together.  In the afternoon she came down, though they had already called on her, and had not expected to see her again.  Her bright eyes, brown hair, flowery , lemon-coloured gloves, and flush beauty, were like an irradiation into the apartment, which they in their gloom could hardly bear.
 
‘I forgot to tell you,’ she said, ‘of a curious thing which happened to me a month or two before my marriage—something which I have thought may have had a connection with the accident to the poor man you have buried to-day.  It was on that evening I was at the manor-house waiting for you to fetch me; I was in the winter-garden with Albert, and we were sitting silent together, when we fancied we heard a cry.  We opened the door, and while Albert ran to fetch his hat, leaving me there, the cry was repeated, and my excited senses made me think I heard my own name.  When Albert came back all was silent, and we that it was only a drunken shout, and not a cry for help.  We both forgot the incident, and it never has occurred to me till since the funeral to-day that it might have been this stranger’s cry.  The name of course was only fancy, or he might have had a wife or child with a name something like mine, poor man!’
 
When she was ............