She picked a second flower, and once more pulled out petal after petal.  As she reached the last again, she answered, slowly:  “You must have forgotten the circumstances.  It was no mere accident.  General Faskally had made a serious strategical blunder at Jhansi.  He had sacrificed the lives of his subordinates needlessly.  He could not bear to face the survivors.  In the course of the retreat, he volunteered to go on this forlorn hope, which might equally well have been led by an officer of lower rank; and he was permitted to do so by Sir Colin in command, as a means of retrieving his lost military character.  He carried his point, but he carried it recklessly, taking care to be shot through the heart himself in the first onslaught.  That was virtual suicide—­ honourable suicide to avoid disgrace, at a moment of supreme remorse and horror.”

“You are right,” I admitted, after a minute’s consideration.  “I see it now—­though I should never have thought of it.”

“That is the use of being a woman,” she answered.

I waited a second once more, and mused.  “Still, that is only one doubtful case,” I objected.

“There was another, you must remember:  his uncle Alfred.”

“Alfred Le Geyt?”

“No; he died in his bed, quietly.  Alfred Faskally.”

“What a memory you have!” I cried, astonished.  “Why, that was before our time—­in the days of the Chartist riots!”

She smiled a certain curious sibylline smile of hers.  Her earnest face looked prettier than ever.  “I told you I could remember many things that happened before I was born,” she answered.  “This is one of them.”

“You remember it directly?”

“How impossible!  Have I not often explained to you that I am no diviner?  I read no book of fate; I call no spirits from the vasty deep.  I simply remember with exceptional clearness what I read and hear.  And I have many times heard the story about Alfred Faskally.”

“So have I—­but I forget it.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t forget.  That is a sort of disease with me. . . .  He was a special constable in the Chartist riots; and being a very strong and powerful man, like his nephew Hugo, he used his truncheon—­his special constable’s baton, or whatever you call it—­with excessive force upon a starveling London tailor in the mob near Charing Cross.  The man was hit on the forehead—­badly hit, so that he died almost immediately of concussion of the brain.  A woman rushed out of the crowd at once, seized the dying man, laid his head on her lap, and shrieked out in a wildly despairing voice that he was her husband, and the father of thirteen children.  Alfred Faskally, who never meant to kill the man, or even to hurt him, but who was laying about him roundly, without realising the terrific force of his blows, was so horrified at what he had done when he heard the woman’s cry, that he rushed off straight to Waterloo Bridge in an agony of remorse and—­flung himself over.  He was drowned instantly.”