for so long a while twenty-five years ago rushed upon her
afresh, so that she could not speak. She sat living over again the bitter
days when Luffe was shut up with his handful of men in the fort by
Kohara. She remembered the morning when the postman came up the garden
path with the official letter that her husband had been slain. And at
last in a whisper she said:

"The Road?"

Dick, even in the presence of her pain, could not deny the implication of
her words.

"We Linforths belong to the Road," he answered gravely. The words struck
upon a chord of memory. Sybil Linforth sat upright, turned to her sort
and greatly surprised him. He had expected an appeal, a prayer. What he
heard was something which raised her higher in his thoughts than ever she
had been, high though he had always placed her.

"Dick," she said, "I have never said a word to dissuade you, have I?
Never a word? Never a single word?" and her tone besought him to
assure her.

"Never a word, mother," he replied.

But still she was not content.

"When you were a boy, when the Road began to take hold on you--when we
were much together, playing cricket out there in the garden," and her
voice broke upon the memory of those golden days, "when I might have been
able, perhaps, to turn you to other thoughts, I never tried to, Dick? Own
to that! I never tried to. When I came upon you up on the top of the Down
behind the house, lying on the grass, looking out--always--always towards
the sea--oh, I knew very well what it was that was drawing you; but I
said nothing, Dick. Not a word--not a word!"

Dick nodded his head.

"That's true, mother. You never questioned me. You never tried to
dissuade me."

Sybil's face shone with a wan smile. She unlocked a drawer in her
writing-table, and took out an envelope. From the envelope she drew a
sheet of paper covered with a faded and yellow handwriting.

"This is the last letter your father ever wrote to me," she said. "Harry
wrote on the night that he--that he died. Oh, Dick, my boy, I have known
for a long time that I would have one day to show it to you, and I wanted
you to feel when that time came that I had not been disloyal."

She had kept her face steady, even her voice calm, by a great effort.
But now the tears filled her eyes and brimmed over, and her voice
suddenly shook between a laugh and a sob. "But oh, Dick," she cried, "I
have so often wanted to be disloyal. I was so often near to it--oh,
very, very