She made no outcry--no wild demonstrations of grief. Her sorrow was too real, too sacred, for any such commonplace manifestations. But when she emerged from her first retirement, it was as a walking ghost. There was something about that strained and unnatural calm, something which overawed those who saw it. She was as one walking outside the world and its incidents. They feared for her brain. As the days slipped by, people wondered. It seemed strange that poor Tom Carhayes should have the faculty of inspiring such intense affection in anybody. No one suspected anything more than the most ordinary of easy-going attachment to exist between him and his wife, yet that the latter was now a broken-hearted woman was but too sadly obvious. Well, there must have been far more in the poor fellow than he had generally been credited with, said the popular voice, and after all, those outside are not of necessity the best judges as to the precise relationship existing between two people. So sympathy for Eanswyth was widespread and unfeigned. Yet amid all her heart-torture, all her aching and hopeless sorrow, poor Tom's fate hardly obtruded itself. In fact, had she been capable of a thorough and candid self-analysis she would have been forced to admit that it was rather a matter for gratulation than otherwise, for under cover of it she was enabled to indulge her heart-broken grief to the uttermost. Apart from this, horrible as it may seem, her predominating feeling toward her dead husband was that of intense bitterness and resentment. He it was who had led the others into peril. That aggressive fool-hardiness of his, which had caused her many and many a long hour of uneasiness and apprehension, had betrayed him to a barbarous death, and with it that other. The cruel irony of it, too, would burst upon her. He had avenged himself in his very death--had broken her heart. Had Tom Carhayes been the only one to fall, it is probable that Eanswyth would have mourned him with genuine--we do not say with durable--regret. It is possible that she might have been afflicted with acute remorse at the part she had played. But now all thoughts of any such thing faded completely from her mind, obliterated by the one overwhelming, stunning stroke which had left her life in shadow until it should end. Then the Rangers had returned, and from the two surviving actors in the terrible tragedy--Payne and Hoste, to wit--she learned the full particulars. It was even as she had suspected--Tom's rashness from first to last. The insane idea of bushbuck hunting in a small party in an enemy's country, then venturing across the river right into what was nothing more nor less than a not very cunningly baited trap--all was due to his truculent fool-hardiness. But Eustace, knowing that her very life was bound up in his--how could _he_ have allowed himself to be so easily led away? And this was the bitterest side of it.