Her father was striding down the hill; the self-respecting gait of the churchwarden was his--the uncompromising stride of the man who worshipped the Conventional, and never failed to go to church for this purpose, returning to eat a one o’clock dinner of roast sirloin and Yorkshire pudding. She watched him for some time, and the smile had never left her face. Then she looked strangely at the bundle of papers which he had flung at her--his action had suggested flinging them--in his wrath at her utterance of all that had been in his own heart for more than a year. She glanced at the papers. They were Canadian, she saw, and they were profuse in the display of strong lettering in the headlines of the columns that met her eyes. It seemed as if the half-column of headlines was designed to exhibit the resources of the typefounders. She saw, without unfolding the papers, that they referred to a wreck that had taken place off the coast of Nova Scotia, great stress being laid on the fact that sixteen lives were lost, and that a man who had tried to carry a line ashore from the wreck had been swept away to destruction. “A Hero’s Death!” was the headline that called attention to this detail. She folded the papers back into their creases. She felt that she could not do full justice on the open road to the matter with which they dealt. She must hurry home and read every line in the seclusion of her own room. In the same spirit she had occasionally hurried to her home with a new novel by a favourite author under her arm. Nothing must disturb her. She must be allowed to gloat over every line--to dwell lovingly upon the bold lettering of the headings, “A Hero’s Death!” She almost ran along the road in her eagerness; and now her elation had increased so greatly that she felt it to be indecent--almost disgraceful--all that her father had suggested that it was. It was all very well for her to be conscious of a certain amount of satisfaction on learning that she was released from the dreadful bondage which compelled her to be the wife of a convict, but it was quite another matter to feel herself lilting that comic opera air, “I’ll kiss you and die like a ‘ero”; and, when she succeeded in banishing that ridiculous melody from buzzing in her ears, to be conscious of the rattle of the drum and the trumpet call of the cornet introducing Don César’s singing of “Let me like a soldier fall” in the opera of “Maritana.” But there they went on in her ears--the banjo-bosh of the one and the swashbuckler’s swagger of the other, accepting the beat of her hastening feet for their _tempo_. The more she hurried, the more rapidly the horrid tuney things went on; and she had a dreadful feeling of never being able to escape from them. She was doomed for her wickedness to be haunted by those jingles for evermore.