Jemmie Alison had been buried a fortnight. The rays of the fallow November sun lighted the table in the window of his old study at which his widow was seated engaged upon the task of sorting out his papers. Mary's hands frilled with snowy organdie were now the hands of her grandmother when _she_ was fifty, fifty years ago. Otherwise she did not resemble Lady Flower, being of a fairer complexion with roses still fresh upon her cheeks and rich brown hair on which the gossamer spun by age was less conspicuous than the first rime upon October leaves. She had paused for a moment from her task and was staring out at the drooping chrysanthemums that gave to the garden of Woodworth Lodge such an aspect of mournfulness and decay. Why did not Markham take them up? There was nothing so melancholy as flowers which had outstayed their season. Winter was at hand. Of what use was it to try to prolong the illusion of summer? Winter was not to be cajoled by such pretenses. Besides, chrysanthemums were at best funereal blossoms. How high they had been heaped a fortnight ago, wreath upon wreath, on Jemmie's coffin.... She turned back to her task of sorting out the papers; but a minute or two later she stopped to reproach herself, as she had reproached herself many times daily since her husband's death with having failed to be as deeply moved by it as she ought. No doubt the protracted illness, when he lingered month by month after the doctors had declared that he could not survive another week, was partly responsible for the absence of emotion. She had been preparing so long for the death that, when at last he did die, she discovered that there was no emotion which she had not already exhausted. Yes, although while he lay dying all those weeks she had fought against a monstrous and wicked hope that the agony would not be too long protracted, at the end her only definite feeling had been one of relief. Poor old Jemmie, he had been so good throughout those weary weeks. The nurses had assured her that they had never known such a patient. It was strange that a man who throughout his life had allowed himself to be disconcerted by the smallest interference with his minor comforts should be able to endure without a murmur months of fierce pain. There must have been something fundamentally noble about Jemmie, some bedrock of character impervious alike to violent passions and the fretful whims of ordinary existence. Impervious at any rate to the latter. It was verging on the ludicrous to associate violent passions with Jemmie, for surely no man ever lived less subject to the stress of the unattainable. Not that his exemption should detract at all from her admiration of his suffering. On the contrary she should yield him a greater respect, because he could never have been tested in the whole of his life as he was tested every hour of that last illness. But herself? Had that endlessly drawn out vigil revealed in herself any fundamental nobility of character? Outwardly