"Not intentionally, perhaps, but with
ordinary people it would have slipped out. `_We_ went to Italy. My
husband liked this or that.' She never advanced even as far as the
`we'. She must have been dreadfully, dreadfully fond of him!"

I wondered! The death of a beloved husband or wife is a devastating
blow; but when the memory is beautiful, time softens it into a hallowed
sweetness. It is the bitter sorrow which refuses to be healed, which
fills the heart with a ceaseless unrest. Not even to Kathie would I
express my doubts, but the conviction weighed upon me that the cloud
which hung over Charmion Fane was the remembrance of unhappiness rather
than joy!

For the next fortnight the greater part of our time was spent in
Charmion's company; generally we were a party of three, but in every day
there came a precious hour or so when I had her alone, and hugged the
secret confidence that the _tete-a-tete_ was as welcome to her as to
myself.

Everything that was to be told about my own uneventful life she knew
before many days were passed, but of her own past she never spoke. From
incidental remarks we found that she had been the godchild of a
well-known politician long since dead, and that at eighteen she had been
presented at Court, which two discoveries proved useful, as they were
enough to convince the aunts that Charmion was a safe and desirable
acquaintance.

Before she was twenty the scene had apparently shifted to America, where
she had lived for several years, and presumably--though she never said
so--had met her husband and spent her brief married life. Widowed--
childless--thirty-two. Those few words supplied all that I knew of
Charmion Fane, except the obvious facts which were patent to the eye.

She was oddly undemonstrative, and for all her charm had a manner which
made it impossible to approach one step nearer than she herself decreed.
Even when it came to the moment of saying good-bye, I could not tell
whether she wished to continue our friendship, or would be content to
let it drop as a passing incident of travel; but to my joy she held on
to my hand with a grip which was almost an appeal, and her thin,
finely-cut lips twitched once and again. She looked full into my face
with her strange eyes, the pupil large, the iris a light grey, ringed
with an edge of black, and said simply, "I'll miss you! But--it will go
on. We will always be friends." That was all, and during the two years
which had