ort just now. I shall not ask him to stay.
Fortunately Henry is here. He will stop for the present. Mary is all
that matters. I shall take her away as quickly as possible and devote my
every thought to her."

"I'm sure you will. It is a sad duty, but may prove a very necessary
one. Their devotion was absolute. It must go hard with her when she
realizes the whole meaning of this."

He went his way, and Sir Walter returned to his child again. With her
he visited the dead, when told that he could do so. She was now very
self-controlled. She stopped a little while only beside her husband.

"How beautiful and happy he looks," she said. "But what I loved is gone;
and, going, it has changed all the rest. This is not Tom--only the least
part of him."

Her father bowed his head.

"I felt so when your mother died, my dearest child."

Then she knelt down and put her hand on the hand of the dead man and
prayed. Her father knelt beside her, and it was he, not the young widow,
who wept.

She rose presently.

"I can think of him better away from him now," she said. "I will not see
him again."

They returned to her old nursery, and he told her that he was going to
face life and take the head of his table at luncheon.

"How brave of you, dear father," she said. Sir Walter waited for the
gong to sound, but it did not, and he rebuked himself for thinking
that it would sound. Masters had a more correct sense of the fitness of
things than he. He thought curiously upon this incident, and suspected
that he must be unhinged a little. Then he remembered a thing that he
had desired to say to Mary and returned to her.

"I do not wish you to sleep in this room to-night, my darling," he said.

"Jane has begged me not to. I am going to sleep with her," she answered.

CHAPTER IV. "BY THE HAND OF GOD"

Sir Walter always remembered that Sunday luncheon and declared that
it reminded him of a very painful experience in his early life. When
big-game shooting in South Africa, he had once been tossed by a wounded
buffalo bull. By good chance the creature threw him into a gully some
feet lower than the surrounding bush. Thus it lost him, and he was safe
from destruction. There, however, he remained with a broken leg for
some hours until rescued; and during that time the mosquitoes caused him
unspeakable torments.

To-day the terrible disaster of the morning became temporarily
overshadowed by the necessity of enduring his friends' c