write to her no more."

This resolution she steadily maintained. It was shaken for a moment,
when she heard, by a side wind, that Mrs. Staines was fast approaching
the great pain and peril of women. Then she wavered. But no. She prayed
for her by name in the Liturgy, but she troubled her no more.

This state of things lasted some six weeks, when she received a letter
from her cousin Tadcaster, close on the heels of his last, to which she
had replied as I have indicated. She knew his handwriting, and opened it
with a smile.

That smile soon died off her horror-stricken face. The letter ran
thus:--

TRISTAN D'ACUNHA, Jan. 5.

DEAR CICELY,--A terrible thing has just happened. We signalled a raft,
with a body on it, and poor Dr. Staines leaned out of the port-hole,
and fell overboard. Three boats were let down after him; but it all went
wrong, somehow, or it was too late. They could never find him, he was
drowned; and the funeral service was read for the poor fellow.

We are all sadly cut up. Everybody loved him. It was dreadful next
day at dinner, when his chair was empty. The very sailors cried at not
finding him.

First of all, I thought I ought to write to his wife. I know where she
lives; it is called Kent Villa, Gravesend. But I was afraid; it might
kill her: and you are so good and sensible, I thought I had better write
to you, and perhaps you could break it to her by degrees, before it gets
in all the papers.

I send this from the island, by a small vessel, and paid him ten pounds
to take it.

Your affectionate cousin,

TADCASTER.

Words are powerless to describe a blow like this: the amazement, the
stupor, the reluctance to believe--the rising, swelling, surging horror.
She sat like a woman of stone, crumpling the letter. "Dead!--dead?"

For a long time this was all her mind could realize--that Christopher
Staines was dead. He who had been so full of life and thought and
genius, and worthier to live than all the world, was dead; and a million
nobodies were still alive, and he was dead.

She lay back on the sofa, and all the power left her limbs. She could
not move a hand.

But suddenly she started up; for a noble instinct told her this blow
must not fall on the wife as it had on her, and in her time of peril.

She had her bonnet on in a moment, and for the first time in her life,
darted out of the house without her maid. She flew along the streets,
scarcely feeling the ground. She got to Dea