She had none; she loved it, for its sights and sounds were mixed up with all the happiness of her young days.  She could have sat all this sunshiny morning on the beach doing absolutely nothing, had she not remembered David’s newspaper; which, just to please him, she must look through.  She did so, and in the corner, among the brief list of names in the obituary, she saw that of “Roy.”  Not himself, as she soon found, as soon as she could see to read, in the sudden blindness that came over her.  Not himself.  Only his child.

“On Christmas-day, at Shanghai, aged three and a half years, Isabella, the only and beloved daughter of Robert and Isabella Roy.”

He was alive, then.  That was her first thought, almost a joyful one, showing how deep had been her secret dread of the contrary.  And he was married.  His “only and beloved daughter?” Oh! how beloved she could well understand.  Married, and a father; and his child was dead.

Many would think it strange (it would be in most women, but it was not in this woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her first few minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he was married and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child and lost it—­he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children.  The thought of his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief—­the grief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in a newspaper that the man they loved was married to another—­did not come.  At least not at once.  It did not burst upon her, as sorrow does sometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring.  She was not slain, not even stunned.  After a few minutes it seemed to her as if it had happened long ago—­as if she had always known it must happen, and was not astonished.

His “only and beloved daughter!” The words sung themselves in and out of her brain, to the murmur of the sea.  How he must have loved the child!  She could almost see him with the little one in his arms, or watching over her bed, or standing beside her small coffin.  Three years and a half old!  Then he must have been married a good while—­long and long after she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can go on thinking of another woman’s husband.

One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteous despair, which nobody heard but God—­and she was not afraid of His hearing—­and the struggle was over.  She saw Robert Roy, with his child in his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totally different man.

She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it was the same sea, the same shore, the same earth and sky, was a totally different woman.  Something was lost, something never to be retrieved on this side the grave, but also something was found.

“He is alive,” she said to herself, with the same strange joy; for now she knew where he was, and what had happened to him.  The silence of all these years was broken, the dead had come to life again, and the lost, in a sense, was found.