Allan stayed in his mother's sitting-room till after midnight, talking of their dead. Lady Emily found a sad pleasure in talking of the husband she had lost, in dwelling fondly upon his virtues, his calm and studious life, his non-interference with her household arrangements, his perfect contentment with the things that satisfied her. "There never was a better husband, Allan," she said, with a tearful sigh, "and yet I know I was not his first love." * * * * * "Not his first love. Alas! no, poor soul," mused Allan, when he had bidden his mother good night, and was seated alone in front of his father's bureau, alone in the dead middle of the night, steeped in the concentrated light of the large shaded lamp, while all the rest of the room was in semi-darkness. "Not his first love! Poor mother. It is happy for you that you know not how near that first love was to being the last and only love of your husband's life. Thank God, you did not know." Often in those quiet days while his father was gradually fading out of life, Allan had argued with himself as to whether it was or was not his duty to reveal Mrs. Wornock's identity with the woman to whom George Carew had dedicated a lifetime of regret, and so to give his father the option of summoning that sad ghost out of the past, of clasping once again the vanished hand, and hearing the voice that had so long been unheard. There would have been rapture, perhaps, to the dying man in one brief hour of re-union; but that hour could not give back youth, or youthful dreams. There would have been the irony of fate in a meeting on the brink of the grave; and whatever touch of feverish gladness there might have been for the dying in that brief hour, its after consequences would have been full of evil for the mourning wife. Better, infinitely better, that she should never know the romance of her husband's youth, never be able to identify the woman he loved, or to inflict upon her own tender heart the self-torture of comparison with such a woman as Mrs. Wornock. For Lady Emily, in her happy ignorance of all details, that early love was but a vague memory of a remote past, a memory too shadowy to be the cause of retrospective jealousy. She knew that her husband had loved and sorrowed; and she knew no more. It must needs be painful to her to identify his lost love in the person of a lady whom her son valued as a friend, and to whom her son's future wife was warmly attached. Allan had felt therefore that he was fully justified in leaving Mrs. Wornock's story unrevealed, even though by that silence he deprived the man who had loved her of the last tearful farewell, the final touch of hands that had long been parted.