The news of Tony's death had reached Cherrington on the morning of the day that Dorothy was going back to the flat. When she had made over half of her money to the dowager and was clear of the fancied atmosphere of hostility at Chatfield, she had begun to feel penitently that she had misjudged her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. It had seemed dreadful to leave them here in this cottage almost within sight and sound of the changes at Clare Court, and she had invited them to come and stay with her in Halfmoon Street until the flat was given up. The dowager had been unwilling to leave the country, and when the news of her son's death arrived was firm in her determination to remain in Cherrington. "He was born here," she said, "and it is here that I shall always think of him best. I don't think I can afford to put up a window to his memory; he must just have a simple stone slab. I should like to copy that inscription at Rhodes. Do you remember it? 'Anthony, Fifth Earl of Clarehaven. With God. 1914.'" Dorothy's grief at the death of Tony had for the moment been kept in control by the tremendous effort she had been called upon to make in facing the future; it was the future which had occupied her mind to the exclusion of any contemplation of the past. Now when her mother-in-law spoke these simple words she burst into tears. They linked Tony with so many generations of his house; and they brought home to her almost as a visible fact his death. She had spent so many years perpetually on the verge, as it were, of broken promises, of resolutions never carried out, of little optimisms and extenuations, that when the announcement of his death arrived it was more than usually true in her case that she did not at first realize it. The telegraphic form in which the news had been conveyed to her involuntarily merged itself with so many telegrams in the past which had turned out false, and only when the dowager stated his death like this in terms that admitted of no doubt did Dorothy suddenly confront the reality. She remembered that once a telegram had arrived almost on this very date to say that Tony could not get away from camp in time to be present at the annual show. There was no annual show this year--war had obliterated it--but on the afternoon of this day on which she had meant to return to town she walked, instead, about the field where the show had customarily been held, and so vivid was the familiar scene of hot women and blazing dahlias that she was transported back in imagination and found herself excusing on the ground of his military duties her husband's absence from this spectral exhibition. A farmer, one of her late tenants, passed her while she was wandering over the field, touched his cap, and begged to express his sorrow at the news.