round of his
thoughts lay a delicious, barely formulated hope that possibly Fate
might vouchsafe to him one fleeting vision on which his hungry heart
might feed in the empty days which must needs ensue.

There had been changes in Littlefield since that November evening on
which the truth concerning the anonymous letters had come to light.
After Tochatti's death it had naturally proved impossible altogether to
hush up the tragedy and its immediate results, and although Anstice had
done his best to mitigate the position for Major Carstairs and his wife,
the inquest had proved a trying affair for all of them.

Since the woman was dead there was no need to keep the authorship of
those letters a secret, and before he left Littlefield Anstice had the
satisfaction of knowing that Mrs. Carstairs' name had been effectually
cleared from the slur placed upon it by a censorious and ignorant world.

When once this was accomplished Major Carstairs insisted on carrying off
his wife and Cherry for a long holiday in the south of France, and
although Cherry wept bitterly at the thought of parting from her beloved
Anstice, he was able to console her by a recital of the wonderful things
she would behold by the shores of the azure Mediterranean.

He was surprised to find, when the real parting came, how hard it was to
say good-bye to his friends. Although he considered himself unsociable,
independent of the claims of friendship, forced, so to speak, into
misanthropy by the circumstances of his life, he had grown to have a
real esteem for Chloe Carstairs, and the spectacle of her new-born
vitality, her radiant happiness, was one which gave him a very deep and
genuine pleasure. As for Cherry, that quaint child had long since twined
herself round his heart-strings, and although Major Carstairs was,
comparatively speaking, a new acquaintance, Anstice respected the
soldier as an honest man and a gentleman.

A week after their departure another blow befell Anstice in the sudden
death of his friend Fraser Carey, and when at last he was summoned in
haste to Carey's aid he found that the latter had suffered for years
from a painful internal disease.

"But why not have submitted to an operation years ago?" Anstice asked
him gently as he sat, impotent to help, by his friend's side in the
light of the dying day. "It might have been successful"--he dare not say
more--"and you would have been spared years of agonizing suffering."

The other man sm