They were walking slowly along the upland road, in the wake of the rest of the party, and Fergusson slackened his pace a little, to give her time to recover her composure, whilst he said gently:-- "I understand. I quite understand." "I think you are a very understanding person," she answered, the falter in her voice making his heart contract with an almost unbearable longing to comfort her. "I--have not heard--that service we have just heard, since it was said--over--John--my husband. It has made me remember--that day--and all it meant to me." Fergusson looked away from her sweet face, aquiver with emotion, out across the wide moorland, where the larks sang in the sunshine, to the far line of blue hills, then he said slowly-- "The words hold wonderful comfort. The triumphant sense of a sure and certain hope, always seems to me to be the keynote of the whole." "Those were the words that stayed in my mind, penetrating through everything else," she said softly, "and though--John had gone away into what seemed unbreakable silence, I knew--that--he had not really gone. I had the sure and certain hope--oh! and more than hope--that he was--very safe, and very near me all the time." The naive expression, the simplicity of the words, spoken from the depths of a simple and sincere heart, flooded Fergusson's heart again with a sense of reverent love, that almost amounted to adoration; but no opportunity to answer her was given him, for Sir Arthur turned back to join Cicely, and a few minutes' further walk brought them to the inn at Graystone, where they were to lunch, before their drive to the railway station. Rupert parted from the rest at the door of the inn. Perhaps Christina was the only member of the party, who realised that he had come to the end of his tether, that an imperative necessity for solitude was upon him, that his power of endurance was nearly at an end. She was standing behind Sir Arthur, when Rupert bade them all good-bye; it was with her that he shook hands last of all, and as she looked up into his face, her eyes held some strange comfort for him. He did not put it into words; he could not have explained even to himself, had he tried to do so, why it was that the glance of those sweet eyes sent a little restful feeling into his troubled heart; but as he went away, some of the tension of misery seemed to relax, the numbness of his pain grew less; in some dim way his hurt had been salved. "Your cousin seems to have been a most devoted friend to my poor sister," Sir Arthur said, after lunch, when he and the two ladies and Fergusson were seated in the small sitting-room of the inn awaiting their carriage. "I cannot conceive why, in the world she could not have married a man like that, instead of the poor miserable fellow who made her life and his own, a burden to them both." "She loved her husband very much," Christina put in gently.