To be out of doors, away from that strange, unreal house of mourning, brought with it a sensation of almost physical relief.

Lingard walked rapidly along, on his way to the Small Farm. He was pursued, obsessed, by the horror of the fact. He felt as if he had never before realised the awful obliteration of death.

Many a mother, wife, sister, kept among the most precious of her treasures letters signed "Hew Lingard"—letters speaking in high terms of a dead son, of a dead husband, of a dead brother. But those men and lads on whose dead faces he had gazed had died the death which to Lingard and his like puts the crown on a soldier's life. He had lost comrades who had been dear to him and whose loss he had lamented sorely. But never, never had the sudden cancelling, so to speak, of a human being brought with it this sense of chilling horror, of nothingness where so much had been.

And then there was something else—something which at once revolted and distressed him inexpressibly. The immediate past, the events of the last four weeks, became, in so far as they concerned the woman who was now lying dead, both fantastic and shameful.

Last night, for the first time, something of Athena's ruthless egotism had forced itself upon Lingard's perception. Hitherto he had been too deeply concerned with his own egotism, his own cruelty, his own remorse, to give thought to hers.

That she should have used Jane Oglander as her ambassador to Richard Maule had shocked, nay more, had disgusted him, as soon as he had found himself away from the magic of her presence.

Wholly absorbed in the future, Athena, after her first words of eager gratitude for Jane's intervention, had dismissed Jane from her mind, expelled her from her mental vision. Nay, she had gone further, for in answer to a muttered word from Lingard, she had at last said something which had jarred his taste, as well as roused that instinctive dog-in-the-manger attitude which slumbers in all men with regard to any woman who has been beloved.

"Jane," Athena had said impatiently, "will end by marrying Dick Wantele. But for me she would have done it long ago!" And angrily the listener's heart, his memory, had given Athena the lie.

After Mrs. Maule had left him the night before, Lingard had gone out of doors, and now chance brought him to the spot where he had stood for a long time staring at the long low house which now sheltered Jane Oglander, driven there, as he knew well, by his base, it now seemed his inconceivable, cruelty. How clearly he had visualised her last night! Imagining her as widely awake as he was himself, but denied by a thousand scruples from the relief of being able to go out, alone, into the darkness and solitude. If they had met there last night, he might at least have told Jane of his fight—of his losing fight for his lost honour. Now she would always believe that he had surrendered without a struggle.

He walked on and into the curious, formal little garden of the Small Farm, even now gay with late autumn blossoms. The beams of a wintry sun lay athwart the picturesque old house.

From the first,—nay, not quite at first, but very soon,—Lingard had disliked Mabel Digby. He had thought of her as an ally of Dick Wantele, and at a time when he was still trying to lie to himself as to the nature of his attraction to Athena, he had often seen her clear brown eyes fixed on him with a puzzled, troubled expression. Even now he could not be sorry she was ill. He felt that to-day he could not have faced those honest, questioning eyes.

Lingard walked up to the porch, and rang the bell. By an odd twist, he began to think, as he stood there, how it would have been with him had it been Jane who was lying dead. Clearly he realised that Jane, dead, would still in a sense have been to him alive. But Athena? Athena was gone—gone into nothingness. He felt a tremor run through him, a touch of the old fever....

"Miss Oglander? I think she's upstairs with Miss Digby, sir. But I'll fetch her down. Will you come into the drawing-room?"

Lingard went through the hall into the long sitting-room which he remembered, as men remember a place to which they have been in dreams. Jane had brought him there on the first morning after her arrival at Rede Place. They had not had a very pleasant walk, for each seemed to have so curiously little to say to the other, and Lingard, at least, had hailed with pleasure the moment when they had gone into the house.

He remembered that he had been amused and touched by the many mementoes of the Indian Mutiny the room contained—quaint coloured prints and amateurish drawings of Delhi, before and during the great epic struggle, curious engraved portraits of the various Mutiny veterans under whom Mabel Digby's father had fought,—signs of a hero-worship the old soldier had transmitted to his daughter.

He also recalled the feeling of acute irritation with which he had noticed Mabel Digby's look of shy congratulation at Jane and at himself. She had been at once too shy and too well-bred to make any allusion to an engagement which was not yet announced, but there had been no mistaking her glance, her smile.

How long ago all that seemed! It might have been years—instead of only weeks.

He went and stood by the fireplace, and then stared up at Outram's portrait. Was that man, and were that man's comrades and contemporaries, whose virtues as well as whose courage have become famous as the virtues and the courage of ancient legendary heroes—were they untouched by the failings and weaknesses of our poor common humanity? It was certainly not true of their own immediate predecessors, or—or of their successors.

A click of the latch—and Jane came into the room. She was pale, but her manner had regained its old quietude and gentleness.

As she came towards him and saw his ravaged face, a feeling of great concern, of pity so maternal in texture that it swept away every other feeling from her heart, almost broke down her new, unnatural composure.

She wished ardently—and Jane was full of hidden fire—to make everything easy for him. But oh! she could not bear him to look as he now looked.

It was not in order that Hew Lingard should look, should feel, as he was now looking and feeling that she had made the great renouncement—the renouncement which Wantele had implored her with such fierce, passionate energy to refrain from making. Was it possible that Wantele had been right, and that she was doing an evil thing by the man she loved?—such was the agonised question which went through Jane Oglander's mind as she advanced quietly towards him.

Only a few moments ago she had destroyed Athena's note of wild joy, of gratitude to herself. As she had watched the paper burn, as she had seen Athena's delicate, graceful monogram vanish in the flame, Jane had felt as if her heart was shrivelling up with it.

She had been in the room but a very few moments, and already her presence was bringing peace to Lingard's seared unhappy soul.

There was nothing on her face to show the conflicting emotions with which she was being shaken, and to him she breathed renunciation, serenity. How amazing to remember that only yesterday her nearness had brought him intolerable unease, as well as keen shame. Now he felt as if a touch from her hand would cure him of all his shameful ills.

Jane Oglander's pity, and he knew that she was very pitiful, had the divine quality of raising, instead of debasing, as does so much of the pity lavished on others in this sad, strange world.

She held out her hand; he felt it fluttering for a moment in his strong grasp, but alas! it was her unease, her miserable misgiving that she now bestowed on him. There came over her eyes and brow a look of suffering, and Lingard dropped her hand quickly. No—he could not tell now, at once, what he had come to tell her.

"Will you come out with me, Jane?" he asked abruptly.

"Yes. Of course I will." It seemed a long, long time since he had asked her to do anything—with him.

They went out into the little hall. As he helped her on with her coat, she made a slight shrinking movement which cut him shrewdly; he reminded himself that she had the right to hate, as well as to despise, him.

With common consent they turned into the lonely country road, instead of under the beeches of Rede Place, and as they walked, each kept rather further from the other than do most people walking side by side. Jane respected his moody silence, and her memory went back to the first walk he and she had taken together on the day of his triumphant return home.

It had been a clear starry London night in autumn, and they had crossed from the shabby, quiet little street where she lived to that portion of the Embankment which lies between the river and St. Thomas's Hospital,—a stone-flagged pavement open only to walkers.

There Lingard had linked his arm through hers, and the movement had given her a delicious thrill of joy, deepening in her that protective instinct which makes every woman long for the man she loves to cling to her.

As they had paced up and down, so happily alone in the peopled solitude London offers to her lovers, Jane's tender heart could not forget what lay so near, and she had compared her blest lot with that meted out to the suffering and the forlorn, who lie in their serried ranks in the wards she so often visited.

How gladly now she would have changed places with the one among them who was nearest to death.

They were close to the Rectory gate, and Jane suddenly remembered that Lingard had promised to go in and see Mrs. Kaye this morning. She had forced herself to ask him to do so, and she remembered now that he had assented to her wish with almost painful eagerness. Perhaps he thought she meant him to go there with her. That would explain his coming to the Farm so early.

"Mr. Maule asked me to come to you," he said at last, breaking the long oppressive silence. "He thought—God knows why he thought it!—that a certain terrible thing which has happened—which happened last night—would reach you best from me."

"Something which happened last night?" Jane repeated in a low voice. "I know it already. Athena wrote to me."

She turned and faced him steadily.

"Don't look like that, Hew. I—I can't bear it. I know you couldn't help what's happened. I know you never loved me in the way a man ought to love a woman whom he is going to marry."

"I did," he said hoarsely. "I swear to God I did!"

She shook her head.

"We both made a mistake," she answered steadily—"and it is fortunate that we discovered it in time. After all, engagements are often broken off, and we were engaged such a little—little while. I am glad Mr. Maule has made up his mind to do what is right."

She flushed for the first time a deep red. The discussion was hateful to her.

"You are going to the Rectory to see Mrs. Kaye? I won't go in with you, but I will wait here till you come out; and then we will walk together to Rede Place. I am going away to-day, back to London, and I can't go away without saying good-bye to them. I promised Athena I would come for a few moments——"

The emotion she was restraining, the tears she kept from falling, stained her face with faint patches of red, and thickened her eyelids. The measure of beauty which was hers, that beauty which owed so much to her ever-varying expression, was wholly obscured to-day.

Lingard felt intolerably moved. It was horrible to him to feel that he had bartered the right, the right he had owned for so short a time and had yielded so lightly, of taking Jane into his arms, and yet he felt he had never loved her as he loved her now, defenceless, before him. He could not wound and shock her by telling her of the terrible thing which had happened. Mr. Maule had asked too much of him.

His mind turned with relief to the task Jane had set him to do. In this matter of comforting the mother of a dead soldier son he would be able surely to bear himself in the old way.

He opened the Rectory gate and walked up, alone, the winding path which led to the front door.

Yes—Kaye was the name of the poor young fellow who had died at Aden. What were his disagreeable associations with the name of Bayworth Kaye?

He remembered.

For the first time since the doctor had told Lingard of what had happened the night before, it seemed as if Athena, her actual physical presence, was close to him again. He could almost hear the sound of her melodious voice as it had sounded when, thrilling with anger and scorn, she had told him of the gossip there had been about herself and this very man, this young Kaye, whose subsequent death seemed to arouse so much pity and concern in the neighbourhood.

Mrs. Kaye had been watching and waiting for General Lingard since ten o'clock. She had spent the hour in her shabby drawing-room going and coming from one window to the other, a tall, gaunt figure, clad in the deepest black.

When she saw him walking through the garden she retreated far back into the room, and there came into her face a look of fierce relief. She had so greatly feared that Mrs. Maule would prevent the fulfilment of his promise.

She was, as we know, a woman who made plans, and who carried out her plans to a successful issue. The rector, in his own way as bereaved, as heartbroken as was his wife, was in his study. She had told him curtly that he must stay there until she came and fetched him.

The cook had been sent into the market town four miles away, and the village girl, who was being trained with a kind of hard efficient care into a parlourmaid, had received her instructions.

General Lingard was to be shown straight into the drawing-room on his arrival; and then the girl was to start immediately on an errand to the village.

There was to be no eavesdropper at the interview Mrs. Kaye intended to have with the great soldier who was coming to offer his condolences on the death of her only son.

Strange rumours had reached the rectory, or rather Mrs. Kaye, for the rector had known nothing of them—rumours which she had drunk in with cruel avidity, rumours of General Lingard's extraordinary absorption in his beautiful hostess, of the long walks and drives they took together, of the many hours they spent alone in her sitting-room.

As yet, however, not even village gossip had linked together the names of Lingard and Jane Oglander. That secret had been well kept, as are most innocent secrets.

At last the young servant announced, in a nervous, fluttered voice, "General Lingard, please, ma'am."

As Lingard walked in, as he saw the figure in deep mourning, his face relaxed and softened.

He himself came of clerical stock. His grandfather had been one of the Golden Canons of Durham, and as a child, as a youth, he had lived much in the more prosperous section of the Church of England. Often in the holidays he had accompanied relations on calls to rectories and vicarages which were as poverty-stricken, as full of self-respecting economy, as was this house. In those days all Lingard's instinct had stood up in rebellion against the clerical atmosphere in which he was being bred. But with years there came across him a queer feeling of loyalty to the cloth, to what had been his father's cloth.

Poor young Kaye! And yet most fortunate young Kaye. Such was Lingard's involuntary thought as he glanced round the homely room—for the lad whose mother stood there mourning him had known that a devoted father and mother watched with solicitude, with pride, with anxiety, every step of his career.

How different from Lingard's own case!—deprived of his parents in babyhood, and with none to care whether he did well in his profession or whether he went to the devil—as he had so very nearly gone to the devil some twenty years ago.

As he shook hands with the grey-haired woman who stood there with so tragic, so oppressed, a look on her face, there came across him the thought of his own long dead mother, and for a moment he was freed of the terrible happenings of the last few hours.

With an effort he set himself to remember all that he had heard to Bayworth Kaye's credit. Those who had mentioned him had nearly all of them alluded to his reckless bravery, to his indifference to physical danger, to his Victoria Cross....

Ah! it was easy to utter a eulogy of such a son when speaking to the bereaved mother. It was so strange, so tragic, too, that he should have died in the way he had died, of fever. Lingard remembered hearing of the alternate hours of anxiety, of hope, and lastly of despair, through which the unfortunate parents had passed between the time they had first heard of their son's illness and of his lonely death.

Mrs. Kaye listened to the kind, heartfelt words of condolence, of respectful pity for herself and for her husband, in silence; and the eyes which she kept fixed on Lingard's face were tearless and very bright. Lingard, moving a little uneasily under their fixed scrutiny, asked himself whether she really heard and understood what he was saying? So far, she had not asked him to sit down.

He remembered a long interview of this kind he had had with another mother. That poor lady had received him surrounded by mementoes of a son who had been a trusty and sure comrade to himself. He recalled the photographs which had been brought out for his inspection, the floods of tears which had punctuated each of his words. But Mrs. Kaye was far more truly stricken than that other mother had been—Mrs. Kaye required no photograph of her son to remind her of his face. She had not yet been granted the relief of tears. Hers was evidently grief of a terrible, a passionate intensity.

"It is good of you to say these things to me, General Lingard—and to spare the time to come and see me," she said at last. "But I should not have troubled you—I should not have presumed to trouble you, were it not that I wish to consult you about what is to me a very important matter."

He bowed his head gravely, and sat down in the shabby armchair to which she rather imperiously motioned him.

"I am entirely at your service," he said quietly. No doubt she wanted some message transmitted to the War Office.

"I have no one else to ask or to consult," she said in low, rapid tones. "It is not a matter about which I desire to trouble my husband, and I am glad to think that he knows, as yet, nothing of what I am going to say to you. Whether he has to learn it or not will depend, General Lingard, on your advice."

Lingard looked at her attentively. He was puzzled and rather disturbed by her words.

"When they told my son he was not likely to live," she said, "he persuaded the doctor to allow him to write a letter to me, his mother."

She stopped a moment, then went on steadily: "In it he made a certain request. It is about that request I wish to consult you, General Lingard. I wish to know whether you consider that I ought to be bound by his wishes. My son desired that his Victoria Cross and one or two other things which he greatly valued, and which we, his parents, naturally value even more than he valued them, should be handed over, given by us to—to a lady."

Lingard felt a sudden feeling of recoil from the woman who sat opposite to him, watching for his answer. Then it was jealousy, pathetic but rather ignoble jealousy, that was making poor Mrs. Kaye look as she looked now—jealousy rather than grief....

There came the sound of a motor-car in the road which was above the level of the rectory garden.

It stopped, and Lingard saw through the window Wantele jump out and cross over to where Jane Oglander was walking up and down.

They spoke together for some moments, and Lingard felt a great lightening of his heart. Wantele must be telling Jane the awful thing which had happened, and he, Lingard, would be spared the dreadful task.

Jane came up close to the car. Lingard could not see the expression on her face. At last, or so it seemed to him, they both got in under the hood.

So Jane, breaking her promise to wait for him, had gone on to the house?

Making a determined effort over himself, Lingard forced himself to return to the matter—the painful, the rather absurd matter—in hand.

"I suppose you know all the circumstances," he began awkwardly.

"The circumstances, General Lingard, are perfectly simple." The fingers of Mrs. Kaye's thin right hand plucked nervously at the buttons which fastened her black woollen bodice. "The lady in question is a married woman. She got hold of my boy, and she bewitched him into forgetting the meaning of what I thought he valued more than life itself—his honour."

She rose up and stared down at Lingard, and there was a terrible look on her face.

"Having amused herself for the best part of a year—having got from him all she wanted—she threw my son aside like a squeezed orange. His heart was broken, General Lingard. I cannot doubt he allowed himself to die. And it is to this woman that he desires I should give all that he has left me to remember him by——"

Lingard had also risen to his feet.

"You are bringing a very serious accusation," he said coldly, "against a lady for whom, as you yourself admit, Mrs. Kaye, your son entertained a great regard. Young men—forgive me for reminding you of what you must know as well as I—sometimes form strange, secret attachments which are, believe me, often as entirely unprovoked as—as—they are unrequited. I have known more than one such instance."

She drew from her breast a piece of paper.

"I ask you, nay, after what you have just said I implore you, to read what is written here——"

She almost thrust it into his reluctant hand.

"I don't wish to trouble you with my private concerns, but read this—read these lines," her shaking finger drew his troubled eyes to the words: "Do not be hurt, mother. You've never understood. In the sight of God Athena is my wife. She was nothing—she was never anything, to that wretched, cruel old man whose name she bears—and to whom she is so good when he allows her to be."

Lingard read the words over twice very deliberately. Then he folded the letter, and handed it back to its owner.

"This letter," he said firmly, "should be destroyed. I am sorry you showed it me, Mrs. Kaye. It was meant for no eyes but yours."

"Ah!" she cried, and tears at last welled up into her eyes. "You blame my poor boy! But he told me nothing I did not already know——"

She went to the fire and, stooping down, held the piece of paper over the tongues of shooting flame till he thought her hand must surely be scorched.

She turned on him. "There! It's gone!" she exclaimed. "No one but you, General Lingard, and I, his mother, will ever know that my son wrote that letter. Perhaps I was wrong to have shown it to you. But what you said—but what you said"—she gave a hard, short sob—"hurt me, made me angry. I did not know how else to make you understand. And now, if you say I ought to do what my son asks, I will abide by your decision."

"In your place," he said quietly, "I should certainly carry out your son's wishes."

But as the mother looked into Lingard's fiercely set face, she told herself, with sombre triumph, that her boy was avenged.

At the door he turned and faced her.

"I cannot help wondering," he said in measured tones, "whether you have heard what has happened at Rede Place? Mrs. Maule took an overdose of chloral last night. She was found dead this morning."

Mrs. Kaye was for a moment utterly astounded by the news. Then, quickly gathering herself together, she said in a low dry tone, "I will ask you to believe, General Lingard, that I was ignorant of this—this judgment when I spoke to you just now."

Lingard made no answer; he looked all round him like a man who seeks some way of escape.

Suddenly there came into his view the figure of Jane Oglander, moving patiently up and down on the road beyond the gate.

So she had waited for him....

As Mrs. Kaye went down the passage leading to her husband's study, she murmured once or twice, "Vengeance is mine!" It was a comfortable thought that she was alone in the house. She did not consider her husband anyone. "Vengeance is mine!" she repeated the words in a louder tone. And then she went into the rector's study and very quietly told him what she had just heard.

Mr. Kaye was truly shocked and grieved. He had always liked Athena. She had always been quite civil to him, and so kind, so remarkably kind, to his dear dead son.

He got up and began looking for his hat. He hoped his wife would not interfere, and prevent his doing what he thought right. It was surely his place, as the clergyman of the parish, to go up to Rede Place and offer his sincere condolences to the bereaved husband.