The dog having died at sea, I presumed it had been buried there, but no, that seemed to shock the company as an unfeeling supposition.  The ship’s carpenter had made a coffin for it—­a beautiful one of mahogany with a plate-glass inset at the head, and a gilt-lettered inscription below, giving the dog’s name, Prue, and its age, three.

In this condition it had been brought ashore, and was now lying in a kind of state in Alma’s dressing-room.  But to-morrow it was to be buried in the grounds, probably in the glen, to which the company, all dressed in black, were to follow in procession as at a human funeral.

I was choking with anger and horror at the recital of these incredible arrangements, and at the close of it I said in a clear, emphatic voice: 

“I must ask you to be good enough not to do that, please.”

“Why not, my dear?” said Alma.

“Because I do not wish and cannot permit it,” I answered.

There was an awkward pause after this unexpected pronouncement, and when the conversation was resumed my quick ears (which have not always added to my happiness) caught the half-smothered words: 

“Getting a bit sidey, isn’t she?”

Nevertheless, when I rose to leave the dining-room, Alma wound her arm round my waist, called me her “dear little nun,” and carried me off to the hall.

There we sat about the big open fire, and after a while the talk became as free, as it often is among fashionable ladies of a certain class.

Mr. Eastcliff’s Camilla told a slightly indelicate anecdote of a “dresser” she had had at the theatre, and then another young woman (the same who “adored the men who went to the deuce for a woman”) repeated the terms of an advertisement she had seen in a Church newspaper:  “A parlour-maid wants a situation in a family where a footman is kept.”

The laughter which followed this story was loud enough, but it was redoubled when Alma’s mother, from the depths of an arm-chair, said, with her usual solemnity, that she “didn’t see nothing to laugh at” in that, and “the pore girl hadn’t no such thought as they had.”

Again I was choking with indignation, and in order to assert myself once for all I said: 

“Ladies, I will ask you to discontinue this kind of conversation.  I don’t like it.”

At last the climax came.

About ten days after Martin left me I received a telegram, which had been put ashore at Southampton, saying, “Good-bye!  God bless you!” and next day there came a newspaper containing an account of his last night at Tilbury.

He had given a dinner to a number of his friends, including his old commander and his wife, several other explorers who happened to be in London, a Cabinet Minister, and the proprietor of the journal which had promoted his expedition.