“Yes; here are all our presents--not one missing: the poor rector’s electric bâton”--with a little half-sobbing laugh--“that we all made such fun of when it first came; and yet, if you remember, _he_ said, in one of his first letters, how useful it had turned out.” The father listens, still striving to maintain the look of being disturbed by irrelevant trifles in a congenial occupation; but the paper crackling slightly betrays the trembling of the fingers that hold it. The girl sits down on the worn arm of her uncle’s chair, while her own arm passes round his neck. “You have had a letter too?” she says, in a voice of cautious tenderness, as one drawing near to an open gash, and adding the caress of a light kiss dropped upon his grey hair. “Who told you that I had a letter?” “Rupert; but he said that you had not shown it to him.” For the moment Sir George forgets to feign. “I thought it might frighten him,” he answers, with a disagreeable smile. “There is a good deal about Mausers and dynamite, and such ugly things in it.” She does not take up the jeer, though it makes her stingingly hot, as if she herself were its object. “Rupert thought that perhaps you might show it to me?” she suggests. “I have no objection to _your_ seeing it!” returns he, with significant emphasis; “that is to say, if I can find it.” With a repetition of that poor parade of carelessness, he feigns to search in all his pockets, as of one that has mislaid something too valueless to be hoarded, and ends by bringing out from--where she had never doubted its resting--the one nearest his heart the narrative of his son’s death, penned by that dead boy’s comrade. Lavinia unfolds it, and, with head reverently bowed, begins to read. It is written in pencil, evidently by one to whom pens and stationery are non-existent, and in parts it is hard to decipher. There is absolute stillness in the room. _Country Life_ has fallen upon the carpet, but Sir George forgets to pick it up. Lavinia pauses at last; for the excellent reason that her eyes are too thick with tears to do her any service. “Oh, _what_ a tribute!” she says, in a suffocated whisper. “You must never--_never_”--catching his hand, and raining salt drops upon it--“never again be so selfish as to grudge him such a glorious death! Oh, which of us does not envy him? which of us would not change with him?” She breaks off suddenly, memory pouring upon the furnace of her passion the cold stream of her _fiancé’s_ cynical question, “Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.” It was only talk, only said to tease her; but why does it recur to her now, like a blasphemy hissed into a believer’s ear in a sanctuary? In a groundless terror lest her thought should be read, she dashes her handkerchief across her eyes, and resumes reading. But every sentence, unstudied, unliterary, plain and crude in its direct passage from heart to heart, blurs her voice afresh--