“It’s a curious thing,” said Sir Dugald, with some hesitation, “but when I told my wife, on the voyage to the Cape, what you had told me about Ferrers’ turning up again, she said at once that she believed poor Ross was alive still. She meant to tell you herself--it didn’t seem quite the sort of thing to write about--but when she was watching beside Mrs Keeling the day she died, she saw her smile when they thought she was insensible, and heard her say quite strongly, ‘They are all there, my father and mother, and my little sister who died--all waiting for me, but not Colin. Elma, where is Colin?’ My wife said something--you know the sort of thing women would say in answer to a thing of the kind--but when she thought it over, it occurred to her that it must mean Ross was not dead. That again is no proof, of course, but it’s curious.” “Very strange,” agreed General Keeling. “Haigh, the more I think of it, the more I feel certain the Jew’s story was true. What conceivable motive could the man have for inventing it? He didn’t know that I had any particular interest in the poor fellows. Poor fellows! it’s blasphemy to call them that. Colin was a true martyr, if ever man was, and as for Ferrers----” “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,” supplied Sir Dugald. “Nothing; but what a miracle it seems that he was able to seize the chance! I sometimes ask myself whether I could have done what either of them did--lived out those years of martyrdom like Colin, or gone back to certain torture and death like Ferrers. We are poor creatures, Haigh, the best of us, and those of whom we expect least sometimes shame us by what they do. Well, they have seen the end of it now, I suppose--‘in Paradise, in the presence of God.’ As for me,” he added with a half-laugh, as he turned to lock up the paper again, “I’m afraid I shouldn’t be happy, even in Paradise, if I couldn’t take a look at the frontier now and then, and make sure it was getting on all right. Why, Missy, what do you want?” The little girl had crept up to them as they talked, and was standing with something clasped to her breast, looking in wonder at their moved faces. As her father spoke, she held out shyly to Sir Dugald a large octagonal tile, covered with a beautiful iridescent glaze, in a peculiarly delicate shade of turquoise. “For Godmamma,” she said, and retreated promptly. “Why, Missy, isn’t that the slab on which you mix your medicines?” asked her father, capturing her. A nod was the only answer. “It’s one of her greatest treasures,” he explained to Sir Dugald. “The men find them sometimes in the ruined forts round here, but it’s very seldom they come on one unbroken, and the man who found this one brought it to her. You really want your Godmamma to have it, Missy?” Another nod. “Well, Haigh, I wouldn’t burden you with it if I didn’t think Lady Haigh would really like it. These things are thought a good deal of.”