Fortune’s first impulse—­what was it?  She hardly knew.  But her second was that safest, easiest thing—­now grown into the habit and refuge of her whole life—­silence.  “No, it certainly does not matter now.”

A deadly sickness came over her.  What if this letter were Robert Roy’s, asking her that question which he said no man ought ever to ask a woman twice?  And she had never seen it—­never answered it.  So, of course, he went away.  Her whole life—­nay, two whole lives—­had been destroyed, and by a mere accident, the aimless mischief of a child’s innocent hand.  She could never prove it, but it might have been so.  And, alas! alas!  God, the merciful God, had allowed it to be so.

Which is the worst, to wake up suddenly and find that our life has been wrecked by our own folly, mistake, or sin, or that it has been done for us either directly by the hand of Providence, or indirectly through some innocent—­nay, possibly not innocent, but intentional—­hand?  In both cases the agony is equally sharp—­the sharper because irremediable.

All these thoughts, vivid as lightning, and as rapid, darted through poor Fortune’s brain during the few moments that she stood with her hand on David’s shoulder, while he drew from his magpie’s nest a heterogeneous mass of rubbish—­pebbles, snail shells, bits of glass and china, fragments even of broken toys.

“Just look there.  What ghosts of my childhood, as people would say!  Dead and buried, though.”  And he laughed merrily—­he in the full tide and glory of his youth.

Fortune Williams looked down on his happy face.  This lad that really loved her would not have hurt her for the world, and her determination was made.  He should never know any thing.  Nobody should ever know any thing.  The “dead and buried” of fifteen years ago must be dead and buried forever.

“David,” she said, “just out of curiosity, put your hand down to the very bottom of that hole, and see if you can fish up the mysterious letter.”

Then she waited, just as one would wait at the edge of some long-closed grave to see if the dead could possibly be claimed as our dead, even if but a handful of unhonored bones.

No, it was not possible.  Nobody could expect it after such a lapse of time.  Something David pulled out—­it might be paper, it might be rags.  It was too dry to be moss or earth, but no one could have recognized it as a letter.

“Give it me,” said Miss Williams, holding out her hand.

David put the little heap of “rubbish” therein.  She regarded it a moment, and then scattered it on the gravel—­“dust to dust,” as we say in our funeral service.  But she said nothing.

At the moment the young people they were waiting for came, to the other side of the gate, clubs in hand.  David and the two Miss Moseleys had by this time become perfectly mad for golf, as is the fashion of the place.  The proceeded across the Links, Miss Williams accompanying them, as in duty bound.  But she said she was “rather tired,” and leaving them in charge of another chaperon—­if chaperons are ever wanted or needed in those merry Links of St. Andrews—­came home alone.