“I’m sure you will.  It is a sad duty, but may prove a very necessary one.  Their devotion was absolute.  It must go hard with her when she realizes the whole meaning of this.”

He went his way, and Sir Walter returned to his child again.  With her he visited the dead, when told that he could do so.  She was now very self-controlled.  She stopped a little while only beside her husband.

“How beautiful and happy he looks,” she said.  “But what I loved is gone; and, going, it has changed all the rest.  This is not Tom—­ only the least part of him.”

Her father bowed his head.

“I felt so when your mother died, my dearest child.”

Then she knelt down and put her hand on the hand of the dead man and prayed.  Her father knelt beside her, and it was he, not the young widow, who wept.

She rose presently.

“I can think of him better away from him now,” she said.  “I will not see him again.”

They returned to her old nursery, and he told her that he was going to face life and take the head of his table at luncheon.

“How brave of you, dear father,” she said.  Sir Walter waited for the gong to sound, but it did not, and he rebuked himself for thinking that it would sound.  Masters had a more correct sense of the fitness of things than he.  He thought curiously upon this incident, and suspected that he must be unhinged a little.  Then he remembered a thing that he had desired to say to Mary and returned to her.

“I do not wish you to sleep in this room to-night, my darling,” he said.

“Jane has begged me not to.  I am going to sleep with her,” she answered.

CHAPTER IV

“By the hand of god”

Sir Walter always remembered that Sunday luncheon and declared that it reminded him of a very painful experience in his early life.  When big-game shooting in South Africa, he had once been tossed by a wounded buffalo bull.  By good chance the creature threw him into a gully some feet lower than the surrounding bush.  Thus it lost him, and he was safe from destruction.  There, however, he remained with a broken leg for some hours until rescued; and during that time the mosquitoes caused him unspeakable torments.

To-day the terrible disaster of the morning became temporarily overshadowed by the necessity of enduring his friends’ comments upon it.  The worst phase of the ordeal was their pity.  Sir Walter had never been pitied in his life, and detested the experience.  This stream of sympathy and the chastened voices much oppressed him.  He was angry with himself also, for a guilty conviction that, in truth, the interest of the visitors exceeded their grief.  He felt it base to suspect them of any such thing; but the buzz of their polite expressions, combined with their cautious questions and evident thirst for knowledge, caused him exquisite uneasiness.