Miss Tighe sat calm and placid, as when the girl first entered, her hands folded on her knee. ‘And what earthly inducement had Pouchée to settle in a University town?’ she observed at length. ‘Why does the woman live alone?’ ‘Her father was maître d’escrime in Cambridge. She and her mother live on in the house where he died. I rather think Mademoiselle gives French lessons still.’ ‘Oh, Mademoiselle gives French lessons still, does she?’ Cassandra’s tone was absent. She rose, moved closer to the hearth. Her face was level with the miniature portrait of a lad in old-fashioned uniform that hung there. By and by, ‘I am going,’ she said very low, ‘to tell you something about which I have been silent for forty years.’ ‘Miss Tighe----’ ‘Don’t be afraid of an old woman’s prosy history, or of a sermon. You will have neither. Forty years ago, child, there lived, in the far north of England, a girl, somewhere about your present age. This girl was on the eve of being married. Her wedding dress was ordered, the guests were bidden. Well, at the eleventh hour she chose, in a flame of paltry jealousy, to resent some fancied want of devotion in her lover. He was single-minded, loyal--of finer stuff, altogether, than herself. They might have been reconciled in an hour if she would have let her heart speak, have returned to the arms outheld to receive her. The girl would make not an inch of concession. She came, as you do, Marjorie, of people who look upon unforgiveness as a virtue. She heard around her the old stock phrases--delicacy, family pride--the righteousness of subordinating feeling to will! And so it came to pass that the lover, having neither wealth nor title, was allowed to go. He exchanged into a regiment under orders for India. Our troops were then in Afghanistan, engaged in hot fighting, and----’ Miss Tighe’s voice--the brave, kind voice that Marjorie had always known--broke down. Marjorie felt herself turn chill with a vague terror. To hear of this white-haired woman’s love seemed, in her overstrained mood, like receiving a message from the world of ghosts. She awaited the sequel of the story, not speaking, not lifting her eyes to the narrator’s face. ‘The lad fell--a locket his sweetheart had once given him hidden in his breast. It came back to her, through a brother officer who knew something of the dead man’s story--_and with a stain on it_. That stain has marked every day of a lonely life throughout forty years. You will not speak of this again, remember.’ ‘Never, Miss Tighe, I promise you.’ ‘But keep my words in your memory. If you meet Geoffrey Arbuthnot, if a moment comes when happiness beckons one way, the Bartrand pride another, they may, perhaps, be of use to you.’