We are all sadly cut up.  Everybody loved him.  It was dreadful next day at dinner, when his chair was empty.  The very sailors cried at not finding him.

First of all, I thought I ought to write to his wife.  I know where she lives; it is called Kent Villa, Gravesend.  But I was afraid; it might kill her:  and you are so good and sensible, I thought I had better write to you, and perhaps you could break it to her by degrees, before it gets in all the papers.

I send this from the island, by a small vessel, and paid him ten pounds to take it.

Your affectionate cousin,

Tadcaster.

Words are powerless to describe a blow like this:  the amazement, the stupor, the reluctance to believe—­the rising, swelling, surging horror.  She sat like a woman of stone, crumpling the letter.  “Dead!—­dead?”

For a long time this was all her mind could realize—­that Christopher Staines was dead.  He who had been so full of life and thought and genius, and worthier to live than all the world, was dead; and a million nobodies were still alive, and he was dead.

She lay back on the sofa, and all the power left her limbs.  She could not move a hand.

But suddenly she started up; for a noble instinct told her this blow must not fall on the wife as it had on her, and in her time of peril.

She had her bonnet on in a moment, and for the first time in her life, darted out of the house without her maid.  She flew along the streets, scarcely feeling the ground.  She got to Dear Street, and obtained Philip Staines’s address.  She flew to it, and there learned he was down at Kent Villa.  Instantly she telegraphed to her maid to come down to her at Gravesend, with things for a short visit, and wait for her at the station; and she went down by train to Gravesend.

Hitherto she had walked on air, driven by one overpowering impulse.  Now, as she sat in the train, she thought a little of herself.  What was before her?  To break to Mrs. Staines that her husband was dead.  To tell her all her misgivings were more than justified.  To encounter her cold civility, and let her know, inch by inch, it must be exchanged for curses and tearing of hair; her husband was dead.  To tell her this, and in the telling of it, perhaps reveal that it was her great bereavement, as well as the wife’s, for she had a deeper affection for him than she ought.

Well, she trembled like an aspen leaf, trembled like one in an ague, even as she sat.  But she persevered.

A noble woman has her courage; not exactly the same as that which leads forlorn hopes against bastions bristling with rifles and tongued with flames and thunderbolts; yet not inferior to it.

Tadcaster, small and dull, but noble by birth and instinct, had seen the right thing for her to do; and she, of the same breed, and nobler far, had seen it too; and the great soul steadily drew the recoiling heart and quivering body to this fiery trial, this act of humanity—­to do which was terrible and hard, to shirk it, cowardly and cruel.