As upon their first greeting, the man bowed ceremoniously, barely touching the fingers proffered. She sighed, sank into her chair again, then turned and smiled determinedly upon her niece with the air of one dismissing the subject. Bethune felt well enough that he too was being dismissed; but he took a step forward and stood looking down upon her. "I do not think you quite understand," he said. "I cannot do this work without your help, Lady Gerardine." "My help!" "I am exceedingly sorry to be so tiresome"—his manner betrayed a curious mixture of patience and irritation—"but you see, that without the papers in your possession my task would be futile. I could not possibly do the work justice." "The papers in my possession!" She echoed the words as helplessly as before. "The papers in your possession," he repeated. "His letters to you, the journal he wrote during the siege, his notes, his whole correspondence—I brought them all back and sent them to you myself—afterwards. And you, you did receive them? You were too ill to see me, I was told, but your friends undertook that you should have them." She was gazing at him, now, with wide eyes growing darker and deeper every moment. The colour rushed up to her face, then faded away, leaving it paler even than before. Her stricken look made him feel like a brute; yet the sheer perversity of her attitude exasperated him. At last: "You want me to give you these papers?" she exclaimed, with a cry. He sat down on the chair next her; and, like one endeavouring to make a fractious child hear reason, began to explain his meaning to her. "I should not presume," he said, "to suggest that you should confide to me writings which can concern only yourself and him. He was a reserved man, and, though he was the best friend, the only friend I ever had, and I perhaps his closest, I should not dream of intruding upon his private life, now—now that he is dead. God forbid! But I want you to help, I want you to give me every necessary extract which concerns his soldier’s life—that life which was such an example to all Englishmen—which I feel it should be given to England to know, as freely as it was laid down for her. Why, there is not even a cairn of stones to mark his grave! Mark his grave? Why, even that grave has been denied to us! But we can yet raise a monument to him that our country may know her dead." His cold somewhat grating voice deepened into a note of such tenderness that Baby wondered in her childish mind. She did not know that a man could so love and mourn a friend. Lady Gerardine had leant back in her chair, her hands clasping the arms. Bethune saw her revolving the question in her mind with such pallid suffering upon her features that he felt torn between anger and a sort of unwilling pity. Her lips moved: "It is impossible." He thought he could not have heard aright. "I beg your pardon?" "It is impossible." "Lady Gerardine...!"