“That you belong to Jack in spite of everything?” the colonel said.  “Why, but of course!  I might have known that Jack would never have allowed any simple incidental happening such as his death to cause his missing a possible trick.”

Anne would have comforted Rudolph Musgrave; but, to her discomfiture, the colonel was grinning, however ruefully.

“I was thinking,” he stated, “of the only time that I ever, to my knowledge, talked face to face with the devil.  It is rather odd how obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers; and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device of introducing a refrain—­so that the idlest remarks of as much as three years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!...  However, were it within my power, I would evoke Amaimon straightway now to come up yonder, through your hearthrug, and to answer me quite honestly if I did not tell him on the beach at Matocton that this, precisely this, would be the outcome of your knowing everything!”

“I told you that I couldn’t, quite, explain——­” Anne said.

“Eh, but I can, my dear,” he informed her.  “The explanation is that Lichfield bore us, shaped us, and made us what we are.  We may not enjoy a monopoly of the virtues here in Lichfield, but there is one trait at least which the children of Lichfield share in common.  We are loyal.  We give but once; and when we give, we give all that we have; and when we have once given it, neither common-sense, nor a concourse of expostulating seraphim, nor anything else in the universe, can induce us to believe that a retraction, or even a qualification, of the gift would be quite worthy of us.”

“But that—­that’s foolish.  Why, it’s unreasonable,” Anne pointed out.

“Of course it is.  And that is why I am proud of Lichfield.  And that is why you are to-day Jack’s wife and always will be just Jack’s wife—­and why to-day I am Patricia’s husband—­and why Lichfield to-day is Lichfield.  There is something braver in life than to be just reasonable, thank God!  And so, we keep the faith, my dear, however obsolete we find fidelity to be.  We keep to the old faith—­we of Lichfield, who have given hostages to the past.  We remember even now that we gave freely in an old time, and did not haggle....  And so, we are proud—­yes! we are consumedly proud, and we know that we have earned the right to be proud.”

A little later Colonel Musgrave said: 

“And yet—­it takes a monstrous while to dispose of our universe’s subtleties.  I have loved you my whole life long, as accurately as we can phrase these matters.  There is no—­no reasonable reason why you should not marry me now; and you would marry me if I pressed it.  And I do not press it.  Perhaps it all comes of our both having been reared in Lichfield.  Perhaps that is why I, too, have been ‘thinking it over.’  You see,” he added, with a smile, “the