unworded social statute of
limitation, as far as Lichfield went. Of course it was interesting to
note that the colonel called at Mrs. Pendomer's rather frequently
nowadays; but, then, Clarice Pendomer had all sorts of callers
now--though not many in skirts--and she played poker with men for money
until unregenerate hours of the night, and was reputed with a wealth of
corroborative detail to have even less discussable sources of income: so
that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained
within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been
born a Bellingham.... But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is
quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this
chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital
aspirations of Cousin Lucy Fentnor.

And, moreover, the colonel--in colloquial phrase at least--went
everywhere. After the six months of comparative seclusion which decency
exacted of his widowerhood--and thereby afforded him ample leisure to
complete and publish his _Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to
1800_--the colonel, be it repeated, went everywhere; and people found
him no whit the worse company for his black gloves and the somber band
stitched to his coatsleeve. So Lichfield again received him gladly, as
the social triumph of his generation. Handsome and trim and affable, no
imaginable tourist could possibly have divined--for everybody in
Lichfield knew, of course--that Rudolph Musgrave had rounded his
half-century; and he stayed, as ever, invaluable to Lichfield matrons
alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town" girl, the management
of a cotillon, and the prevention of unpleasant pauses among incongruous
dinner-companies.

But of Anne Charteris he saw very little nowadays. And, indeed, it was
of her own choice that Anne lived apart from Lichfieldian junketings,
contented with her dreams and her pride therein, and her remorseful
tender memories of the things she might have done for Jack and had not
done--lived upon exalted levels nowadays, to which the colonel's more
urbane bereavement did not aspire.

III

"Charteris" was engraved in large, raised letters upon the granite
coping over which Anne stepped to enter the trim burial-plot wherein her
dead lay.

The place to-day is one of the "points of interest" in Cedarwood.
Tourists, passing through Lichfield, visit it as inevitably as they do
the graves of the Pr