At last one evening he observed quite quietly, in a pause in their talk:  “So you live here on L800 a year?”

Rose did not feel annoyed, though she did not know why she was not angry.

“Yes, I can manage,” she said simply.

“You can’t tell yet; it’s too soon.”  He got up out of his low chair near the fireplace, now filled with plants, and stood with his back against the chimney.  “You know it’s absurd,” he said.  Rose moved uneasily and was silent.

“It’s absurd,” he repeated, “there’s another will somewhere.  David would never have done that.”  He struck that note at the start, and cursed David all the deeper in the depths of his diplomatic soul.  Rose looked at him gratefully, kindly.

“I think there is another will somewhere,” she said, “but I am sure it will never be found.  It’s no use to think or talk of it, Edmund.”

He fidgeted for a moment with the china on the chimney-piece.

“For ‘auld lang syne,’ Rose,” he said in a very low voice, “and because you might possibly, just possibly, have made something of me if you had chosen, let me know a little more about it.  I want to see what was in his last letter.”

Rose flushed deeply.  It was difficult to say why she yielded except that most people did yield to Grosse if he got them alone.  She drew off the third finger of her left hand a very remarkable diamond ring and gave it to him.  Then she took out of a drawer a faded photograph of a young, commonplace, open-faced officer, now framed in an exquisite stamped leather case, and handed that to him also.  He saw that she hesitated.

“May I have the rest,” he said very gently.  Even her mother had never seen the piece of paper.  No, she could not show that.  Edmund did not insist further, and a moment later he seemed to have forgotten that she had not given him what he asked for.

“Did he often wear this ring?”

“Never.  I never saw it till now, and I had never seen the photograph.”

“It was taken in India,” he commented, “and the ring has a date twenty years ago.”

“I never noticed that,” said Rose.  She was feeling half consciously soothed and relieved as a child might feel comforted who had found a companion in a room that was haunted.

“Things from such a remote past,” he murmured abstractedly.  “Did he explain in writing why he sent those things?”

“No, he said nothing about them, he only——­” she paused.  Edmund did not move, and in a few moments she gave him the paper.  He ground his teeth as he read it, he grew white about the lips, but he said nothing.  He was horribly disappointed—­the scoundrel asked for forgiveness.  Then he had not made another will.  Edmund did not look round at Rose, but she was acutely present to his consciousness—­the woman’s beauty, the child’s innocence, the suffering and the strength in her face.  “As you would be forgiven!” That was a further insult,