“Dear Mr. Lyndsay,” ran the first, “why did you not come over
     to-day?  I was expecting you to appear all the afternoon.—­Yours
     sincerely, G.E.L.”

The second was dated four weeks later—­

“You silly boy!  I forbid you ever to write or talk of yourself in such a way again.  You are not a cripple; and if you had ever had a mother or a sister, you would know how little women think of such things.  How many more assurances do you expect from me?  Do you wish me to propose to you again?  No, if you won’t have me, go.—­Yours, in spite of yourself, Gladys.”

The third—­the third is too long to quote entire; besides, the substance is contained in this last sentence—­

     “So I think, my dear Mr. Lyndsay, for your sake more than my own,
     our engagement had better be broken off.”

In this letter, dated six weeks ago, she had charged me to burn all that she had written to me, and as yet I had not done so, shrinking from the sharp unreasonable pain with which we bury the beloved dead.  But the time of my mourning was accomplished.  I tore the paper into fragments and dropped them into the flames.

It must have been the pang with which I watched them darken and shrivel that brought back the memory of another sharp stab.  It was that day ten years ago, when I walked for the first time after my accident.  Supported by a stick on one side, and by Atherley on the other, I crawled down the long gallery at home and halted before a high wide-open window to see the sunlit view of park and woods and distant downland.  Then all at once, ridden by my groom, Charming went past with feet that verily danced upon the greensward, and quivering nostrils that rapturously inhaled the breath of spring and of morning.  I said:  “George, I want you to have Charming.”  And it made me smile, even in that bitter moment, to remember how indistinctly, how churlishly almost, Atherley accepted the gift, in his eager haste to get me out of sight and thought of it.

It was long before the last fluttering rags had vanished, transmuted into fiery dust.  The clock on the landing had many times chanted its dirge since I had heard below the footsteps of the servants carrying away the lamps from the sitting-rooms and the hall.  Later still came the far-off sound of Atherley’s door closing behind him, like the final good-night of the waking day.  Over all the unconscious household had stolen that silence which is more than silence, that hush which seems to wait for something, that stillness of the night-watch which is kept alone.  It was familiar enough to me, but to-night it had a new meaning; like the sunlight that shines when we are happy, or the rain that falls when we are weeping, it seemed, as if in sympathy, to be repeating and accenting what I could not so vividly have told in words.  In my life, and for the second time, there was the same desolate pause, as if the dreary tale were finished and only the drearier epilogue remained to live through—­the same sense of sad separation from the happy and the healthful.