d have gone. But to face the prospect of ruining
two men, as it looked to her, had till then been too much for that
soft-hearted creature. Death stilled her struggle before it was decided.
There are women in whom utter devotion can still go hand in hand with a
doubting soul. Such are generally the most fascinating; for the power of
hard and prompt decision robs women of mystery, of the subtle atmosphere
of change and chance. Though she had but one part in four of foreign
blood, she was not at all English. But Winton was English to his
back-bone, English in his sense of form, and in that curious streak of
whole-hearted desperation that will break form to smithereens in one
department and leave it untouched in every other of its owner's life. To
have called Winton a "crank" would never have occurred to any one--his
hair was always perfectly parted; his boots glowed; he was hard and
reticent, accepting and observing every canon of well-bred existence.
Yet, in that, his one infatuation, he was as lost to the world and its
opinion as the longest-haired lentil-eater of us all. Though at any
moment during that one year of their love he would have risked his life
and sacrificed his career for a whole day in her company, he never, by
word or look, compromised her. He had carried his punctilious observance
of her "honour" to a point more bitter than death, consenting, even,
to her covering up the tracks of their child's coming. Paying that
gambler's debt was by far the bravest deed of his life, and even now its
memory festered.

To this very room he had come back after hearing she was dead; this very
room which he had refurnished to her taste, so that even now, with
its satinwood chairs, little dainty Jacobean bureau, shaded old brass
candelabra, divan, it still had an air exotic to bachelordom. There, on
the table, had been a letter recalling him to his regiment, ordered on
active service. If he had realized what he would go through before
he had the chance of trying to lose his life out there, he would
undoubtedly have taken that life, sitting in this very chair before the
fire--the chair sacred to her and memory. He had not the luck he wished
for in that little war--men who don't care whether they live or die
seldom have. He secured nothing but distinction. When it was over, he
went on, with a few more lines in his face, a few more wrinkles in his
heart, soldiering, shooting tigers, pig-sticking, playing polo, riding
to hounds