to herself. "Still, it is strange."

The facts were these. The newspaper gave the date of Major Graham's
death as the 25th November--the afternoon on which he had appeared to
Mrs. Medway and her servant was that of the 26th. This left no
possibility of calculating that the vision had occurred at or even
shortly after the moment of the death.

"It must be a mistake in the announcement," Anne decided. And then she
gave herself up to the acceptance of the fact. Kenneth was dead. Life
held no individual future for her any more--nothing to look forward to,
no hopes, however tremblingly admitted, that "some day" he might return,
and return to discover--to own, perhaps, to himself and to her that he
did love her, and that only mistaken pride, or her own coldness, or one
of the hundred "mistakes" or "perhapses" by which men, so much more than
women, allow to drift away from them the happiness they might grasp, had
misled and withheld him! No; all was over. Henceforth she must live in
her children alone--in the interests of others she must find her
happiness.

"And in one blessed thought," said the poor girl--for she was little
more--even at the first to herself; "that after all he _did_ love me,
that I may, without shame, say so in my heart, for I was his last
thought. It was--it must have been--to tell me so that he came that day.
My Kenneth--yes, he was mine after all."

Some little time passed. In the quiet country place whither, sorely
against Seton's desires, Mrs. Medway had betaken herself for "change,"
she heard no mention of Major Graham's death. One or two friends
casually alluded to it in their letters as "very sad," but that was all.
And Anne was glad of it.

"I must brace myself to hear it spoken of and discussed by the friends
who knew him well--who knew how well _I_ knew him"--she reflected. "But
I am glad to escape it for a while."

It was February already, more than three months since Kenneth Graham had
left England, when one morning--among letters forwarded from her London
address--came a thin foreign paper one with the traces of travel upon
it--of which the superscription made Anne start and then turn pale and
cold.

"I did not think of this," she said to herself. "He must have left it to
be forwarded to me. It is terrible--getting a letter after the hand that
wrote it has been long dead and cold."

With trembling fingers she opened it.

"My dear--may I say my dearest Anne," were the first words t