“Execrable,” he repeated. He had come to a conclusion. It was part of her moral conception of their situation that he should begin his love-making over again. She would not tolerate their picking it up and going on with it. At least that was her attitude. He wondered, indulgently, how long she would be able to keep it. “And Calcutta? I suppose you left it steaming?” “I hardly know. I was there only a couple of days before the mail left. Almost the whole of July I have been on tour.” “Oh—really?” said Mrs. Church. Her face assumed the slight sad impenetrability with which we give people to understand that they are trespassing upon ground hallowed by the association of grief. Ancram observed, with irritation, that she almost imposed silence upon him for a moment. Her look suggested to him that if he made any further careless allusions she might break into tears. “Dear me!” Judith said softly at last, pouring out the tea, “how you bring everything back to me!” He thought of saying boldly that he had come to bring her back to everything, but for some reason he refrained. “Not unpleasantly, I hope?” He had an instant’s astonishment at finding such a commonplace upon his lips. He had thought of this in poems for months. She gave him his tea, and a pathetic smile. It was so pathetic that he looked away from it, and his eye fell upon the portrait of John Church, framed, near her on the table. “Do you think it is a good one?” she asked eagerly, following his glance. “Do you think it does him justice? It was so difficult,” she added softly, “to do him justice.” Sir Lewis Ancram stirred his tea vigorously. He never took sugar, but the manipulation of his spoon enabled him to say, with candid emphasis, “He never got justice.” For the moment he would abandon his personal interest, he would humour her conscience; he would dwell upon the past, for the moment. “No,” she said, “I think he never did. Perhaps, now——” Ancram’s lip curled expressively. “Yes, now,” he said—“now that no appreciation can encourage him, no applause stimulate him, now that he is for ever past it and them, they can find nothing too good to say of him. What a set of curs they are!” “It is the old story,” she replied. Her eyes were full of sadness. “Forgive me!” Ancram said involuntarily. Then he wondered for what he had asked to be forgiven. “He was a martyr,” Judith went on calmly—“‘John Church, martyr,’ is the way they ought to write him down in the Service records. But there were a few people who knew him great and worthy while he lived. I was one——” “And I was another. There were more than you think.” “He used to trust you. Especially in the matter that killed him—that educational matter—he often said that without your sympathy and support he would hardly know where to turn.” “His policy was right. Events are showing now how right it was. Every day I find what excellent reason he had for all he did.”