"I don't think we shall, either of us." It was a daughter's marriage-warrant he was being asked to sign; a document seldom signed without a heartache, more or less, for him who holds the pen. But his _coeur navre_ had to be concealed, for the sake of the applicant; no wet blanket should be cast on her new happiness. He kissed her affectionately. To him, for all her thirty-nine or forty birthdays, she was still the young girl he had helped and shielded in her despair, twenty years ago, he himself being then a widower, near forty years her senior. "No, Rosa dear," continued the Major. "As far as I can see, there can be no objection but one--_you_ know!" "_The_ one?" "Yes. It is all a _terra incognita_. He _may_ have a wife elsewhere, seeking for him. Who can tell?" "It is a risk to be run. But I am prepared to run it"--she was going to add "for his sake," but remembered that her real meaning for these words would be, "for the sake of the man I wronged," and that the Major knew nothing of Fenwick's identity. She had not been able to persuade herself to make even her old friend her confidant. Danger lay that way. She _knew_ silence would be safe against anything but Fenwick's own memory. "Yes, it is a risk, no doubt," the Major said. "But I am like him. I cannot conceive a man forgetting that he had a wife. It seems an impossibility. He has talked about you to me, you know." "In connexion with his intention about me?" "Almost. Not quite definitely, but almost. He knew I understood what he meant. It seemed to me he was fidgeting more about his having so little to offer in the way of worldly goods than about any possible wife in the clouds." "Dear fellow! Just fancy! Why, those people in the City would take him into partnership to-morrow if he had a little capital to bring in. They told him so themselves." "And you would finance him? Is that the idea? Well, I suppose as I'm your trustee, if the money was all lost, I should have to make it up, so it wouldn't matter." "Oh, Major dear! is _that_ what being a trustee means?" "Of course, my dear Rosa! What did you think it meant?" "Do you know, I don't know what I _did_ think; at least, I thought it would be very nice if you were my trustee." The conversation has gone off on a siding, but the Major shunts the train back. "That was what you and little fiddle-stick's-end were talking about till three in the morning, then?" "Oh, Major dear, did you hear us? And we kept you awake? What a _shame_!" * * * * *