visited her. Mrs. Massey was dead and buried. She had left him the
property, and with some reluctance, he had given up his profession, in
which he saw no further prospects, and come to live upon it. This was
his first evening in the place, for he had arrived by the last train
on the previous night. All day he had been busy trying to get the
house a little straight, and now, thoroughly tired, he was refreshing
himself by leaning over a gate. It is, though a great many people will
not believe it, one of the most delightful and certainly one of the
cheapest refreshments in the world.

And then it was, as he leant over the gate, that the image of a
woman's face rose before his mind as it had continually risen during
the last five years. Five years had gone since he saw it, and those
five years he spent in India and Egypt, that is with the exception of
six months which he passed in hospital--the upshot of an Arab spear
thrust in the thigh.

It had risen before him in all sorts of places and at all sorts of
times; in his sleep, in his waking moments, at mess, out shooting, and
even once in the hot rush of battle. He remembered it well--it was at
El Teb. It happened that stern necessity forced him to shoot a man
with his pistol. The bullet cut through his enemy, and with a few
convulsions he died. He watched him die, he could not help doing so,
there was some fascination in following the act of his own hand to its
dreadful conclusion, and indeed conclusion and commencement were very
near together. The terror of the sight, the terror of what in defence
of his own life he was forced to do, revolted him even in the heat of
the fight, and even then, over that ghastly and distorted face,
another face spread itself like a mask, blotting it out from view--
that woman's face. And now again it re-arose, inspiring him with the