The breakfast was served in the room abutting on the cliff in the dim light of a misty morning. The lamps were alight on the table, and Paul was waiting when Maggie came down cloaked for her journey. Steinmetz had breakfasted. They said good-morning, and managed to talk of ordinary things until Maggie was supplied with coffee and toast and a somewhat heavy, manly helping of a breakfast-dish. Then came a silence. Paul broke it at length with an effort, standing, as it were, on the edge of the forbidden topic. "Steinmetz will take you all the way," he said, "and then come back to me. You can safely trust yourself to his care." "Yes," answered the girl, looking at the food set before her with a helpless stare. "It is not that. Can I safely trust Etta's memory to your judgment? You are very stern, Paul. I think you might easily misjudge her. Men do not always understand a woman's temptations." Paul had not sat down. He walked away to the window, and stood there looking out into the gloomy mists. "It is not because she was my cousin," said Maggie from the table; "it is because she was a woman leaving her memory to be judged by two men who are both--hard." Paul neither looked round nor answered. "When a woman has to form her own life, and renders it a prominent one, she usually makes a huge mistake of it," said the girl. She waited a moment, and then she pleaded once more, hastily, for she heard a step approaching. "If you only understood every thing you might think differently--it is because you cannot understand." Then Paul turned round slowly. "No," he said, "I cannot understand it, and I do not think that I ever shall." And Steinmetz came into the room. In a few minutes the sleigh bearing Steinmetz and Maggie disappeared into the gloom, closely followed by a couple of Cossacks acting as guard and carrying despatches. So Etta Sydney Bamborough--the Princess Howard Alexis--came back after all to her husband, lying in a nameless grave in the churchyard by the Volga at Tver. Within the white walls--beneath the shadow of the great spangled cupola--they await the Verdict, almost side by side. CHAPTER XLIV KISMET Between Brandon in Suffolk and Thetford in Norfolk runs a quiet river, the Little Ouse, where few boats break the stillness of the water. On either bank stand whispering beech-trees, and so low is the music of the leaves that the message of Ely's distant bells floats through them on a quiet evening as far as Brandon and beyond it. Three years after Etta's death, in the glow of an April sunset, a Canadian canoe was making its stealthy way up the river. The paddle crept in and out so gently, so lazily and peacefully, that the dabchicks and other waterfowl did not cease their chatter of nests and other April matters as the canoe glided by.