be present at the funeral, leaning on the arm of her brother, Enoch Bent, head clerk of Mr. Toogood the lawyer.

Little by little the mourners all passed through the lych-gate into the ancient churchyard. The rector had a good voice, and tears rose to many eyes as he read the noble, solemn words of the burial service.

It was remembered afterward that Harry Garlett, though he looked sad, was absolutely composed. When the burial was over he lingered for a few minutes talking to the rector, 43doubtless in the hope that the crowd would disperse. Then he quietly walked down the short, broad village street, and so through into the beautiful garden of the house which somehow he had never quite regarded as his property, if only because it was there that he had first known his wife, and where, as people sometimes unkindly put it, he had “hung up his hat” when he married, instead of taking his bride to a new home.

43

It is fortunate indeed that men and women cannot read each other’s thoughts, for, truth to tell, during the whole of his wife’s funeral service, Harry Garlett’s mind had been most uncomfortably full of another woman.

To this woman, none other than Agatha Cheale, he had written a formal note that morning saying he would like to see her after the funeral for a few minutes. And now he wondered whether she expected him to go to Miss Prince’s house, where she had been staying the last few days, or whether he would find her waiting for him in the Thatched House in the room which, till his wife’s death, had been known as “Miss Cheale’s room.”

He went into the empty hall, took off his hat, but still wearing his great coat, hurried down the passage. Then, after a moment’s pause, he knocked at the door.

A quiet voice said “Come in,” and as he entered the room he saw Agatha Cheale standing by the empty fireplace. All the little intimate possessions which cause a room to be associated with one personality had been cleared away. Already his late wife’s companion looked, as well as felt, a stranger in this house where she had spent so secretly dramatic, while so openly calm, a year of her life.

And now she gazed with sunken, burning eyes at the man who stood before her. How well he looked, how young, how strong!—his life, which in the last few days she had come to realize would never be shared by her, open before him. Deep in her unhappy, tormented heart there had survived up to 

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