ank God. I don't expect, from what you tell me of him, he'll
choose the Service. However, he'll do what he likes. When I come
back, I must see him and I shall be able to explain what will
perhaps strike him at first as the injustice of his position. I
dare say he'll think less hardly of me when I've told him all the
circumstances. Poor old chap! I feel that I've been selfish, and
yet_....

"_I wonder if I'm going to be ill. I feel rotten. But don't worry.
Only, if by any chance I can't write again, will you give my love
to the children, and say I hope they'll not hate the thought of me?
That piano was the best Prescott could get. I hope Stella is
pleased with it_."

"Thanks awfully for reading us that," said Michael.

Chapter XX: _Music_

Mrs. Fane, having momentarily lifted the veil that all these years had
hidden her personality from Michael and Stella, dropped it very swiftly
again. Only the greatest emotion could have given her the courage to
make that avowal of her life. During the days that elapsed between the
revelation and the reading of Lord Saxby's last letter, she had lived
very much apart from her children, so that the spectacle of her solitary
grief had been deeply impressed upon their sensibility.

Michael was reminded by her attitude of those long vigils formerly
sustained by ladies of noble birth before they, departed into a convent
to pray, eternally remote from the world. He himself became endowed with
a strange courage by the contemplation of his mother's tragical
immobility. He found in her the expression of those most voiceless
ideals of austere conduct that until this vision of resignation had
always seemed doomed to sink broken-winged to earth. The thought of Lily
in this mood became an intrusion, and he told himself that, even if it
were possible to seek the sweet unrest of her presence, beneath the
sombre spell of this more classic sorrow he would have shunned that
lovely and romantic girl. Michael's own realization of the circumstances
of his birth occupied a very small part of his thoughts. His mind was
fixed upon the aspect of his mother mute and heavy-lidded from the
remembrance of that soldier dead in Africa. Michael felt no outrage of
fate in these events. He was glad that death should have brought to his
father the contentment of his country's honour, that in the grace of
reconciliation he should be healed of his thwarted