Wantele's mind went back six years to that melancholy, that sordid, scene in the prison infirmary. They had sent the sister away, reassured her, told her there was a change for the better. And then suddenly young Oglander had sunk--but he, Wantele, had been there, with him.... She was speaking again, in a low musing tone:-- "It's so strange----" she said, and then amended her words--"Isn't it strange that death is so material, so horribly real a thing? It seems so hard that there has to be so much fuss. If only one could slip away into nothingness how much better it would be, Dick--wouldn't it?" Her mind swung back to her brother. There came a gentler, a softer tone in her sad voice. "I wonder if you remember that you were the only one who did not bid me rejoice that Jack was dead. I have never forgotten that. And you were right, Dick. It was a great misfortune for me that he died. He would have been out of prison by now--and we should have been together, abroad----He was so clever, I think we should have been able to make some kind of life--and you would have come and stayed with us sometimes----But it's no use talking like that, is it? I know I'm foolish, unreasonable, to-day, and you are the only person to whom I ever talk of Jack." She was putting up her dead brother as a shield between herself and her distress, and Wantele respected the poor subterfuge. "I know, I know," he said feelingly. They walked on in silence for a while, then. "I think, Dick, that I had better go away." "No, no!" he cried. "Don't do that, Jane! Believe me, that would be a very unwise thing to do. I take it that you and General Lingard"--he brought out the name of her betrothed with an effort--"have other joint visits to pay?" She shook her head. "I haven't told anybody. Only the Paches know. He thought he ought to tell them." "If you go away, Jane, he will almost certainly stay on here. It would be a pity for him to do that," Wantele spoke with studied calmness. "Yes, I suppose it would," the colour rushed into her face. "I want to tell you something, Dick. Hew was very noble about my brother. I told him about it very soon after we first met one another. You see we became friends so soon----" She sighed. "Just friends, you know." Wantele turned and looked into her face with an indefinable expression of shamed curiosity--an expression that seemed to ask a thousand questions he had no right to ask. "And then he began to write to me," she went on rather breathlessly, as if answering some inward questioning of her own rather than of his. "I was amazed when I received his first letter--it seemed such a strange thing for him to write to me, and then he asked if he might come and see me before he went away." She waited a moment, and went on, "I was the only person to whom he wrote while he was away. He's had a very lonely life, Dick,--no brothers, no sisters, and his mother died when he was a little child."