nd appeared dissatisfied. "And John Charteris
of all people!"

Anne was presently about the Memorial Edition of her husband's
collected writings. It was magnificently printed and when marketed
achieved a flattering success. Robert Etheridge Townsend was
commissioned to write the authorized _Life of John Charteris_ and to
arrange the two volumes of _Letters_.

Anne was considered an authority on literature and art in general,
through virtue of reflected glory. And in the interviews she granted
various journalists it was noticeable that she no longer referred to
"Jack" or to "Mr. Charteris," but to "my husband." To have been his wife
was her one claim on estimation. And, for the rest, it is inadequate to
love the memory of a martyr. Worship is demanded; and so the wife became
the priestess.

II

Into Colonel Musgrave's mental processes during this period it will not
do to pry too closely. The man had his white nights and his battles, in
part with real grief and regret, and in part with sundry emotions which
he took on faith as the emotions he ought to have, and, therefore,
manifestly, suffered under.... "Patricia was my wife, Jack was my
brother," ran his verdict in the outcome; and beyond that he did not
care to go.

For death cowed his thoughts. In the colonel's explicit theology dead
people were straightway conveyed to either one or the other of two
places. He had very certainly never known anybody who in his opinion
merited the torments of his orthodox Gehenna; so that in imagination he
vaguely populated its blazing corridors with Nero and Judas and Caesar
Borgia and Henry VIII, and Spanish Inquisitors and the aboriginal
American Indians--excepting of course his ancestress Pocahontas--and
with Benedict Arnold and all the "carpet-baggers" and suchlike other
eminent practitioners of depravity. For no one whom Rudolph Musgrave
had ever encountered in the flesh had been really and profoundly wicked,
Rudolph Musgrave considered; and so, he always gravely estimated
this-or-that acquaintance, after death, to be "better off, poor
fellow"--as the colonel phrased it, with a tinge of
self-contradiction--even if he actually refrained in fancy from endowing
the deceased with aureate harps and crowns and footgear. In fine, death
cowed the colonel's thoughts; beyond the grave they did not care to
venture, and when confronted with that abyss they decorously balked.

Patricia and Jack were as a matter of course "better