“It is the fortune of war,” said Derwent, when he learned, to his profound amazement, this idea which had taken possession of me. “It is the will of God,” said Captain Hughes’s pale widow, lifting her tearful face to me, from under the heavy veil of her mourning. So it was--but sharp and poignant is the contest between grief and joy. “See what your despised telegraph can do, after all!” cried Derwent, rejoicing with all his honest heart over the news he had brought. “But, ah! if Bertie’s friend had been poor!” said I. “How many souls do we wring with additional pangs, to have our anxiety dispelled the more easily? Think of the news of a battle, with so many killed and wounded--and some dreadful fortnight, or maybe month, to live through before one knows whether one’s own is dead or alive. No, ’tis a cruel earthly Geni, and not a celestial Spirit--it does good now and then, only because it cannot help it--relieves us, Derwent, but slaughters poor Mrs. Hughes.” “I believe Clare is not half-content--nobody must be killed to satisfy you women--but, unfortunately that will not do in this world,” said Derwent. “We have to be thankful for our own exemption, without entering too deeply into other people’s grief. And most of us find that philosophy easy enough.” “Most of us are very poor creatures,” said Maurice Harley, sententiously. He came alone to make his inquiries this time. Alice was invisible, and not to be heard of. I could not see her even when I called at the cottage. She had taken overpowering shame to herself, and shrank from my eyes. It was her brother who carried our news to his mother’s house--carried it, as I discovered incidentally, with the rarest and most delicate care for her--rigidly keeping up the fiction of supposing her not to care for it, nor to be specially interested, any more than for her old playfellow. He was ill at ease himself, and distracted with questions no longer of a _dilettante_ kind. In my eyes this increased his kindness all the more. “Yes, we are poor creatures the most of us,” repeated Maurice, when my husband--who did not notice any particular improvement in the Fellow of Exeter, and was disposed to be contemptuous, as elder men are, of his superiority to ordinary mortals--had sauntered, half-laughing, half-disgusted, out of the room. “Something you said the other day has stuck to my memory, Mrs. Crofton--help me out with it, pray. Are we worth a woman’s tears, the greater part of us? What is the good of us? I don’t mean Bertie, who is doing something in this world, but, for example, such a fellow as me!”