Captain Selwyn. I did not know you were serious."

"Oh, I'm not," he returned lightly, "I'm never serious. No man who
soliloquises can be taken seriously. Don't you know, Miss Erroll, that
the crowning absurdity of all tragedy is the soliloquy?"

Her smile became delightfully uncertain; she did not quite understand
him--though her instinct warned her that, for a second, something had
menaced their understanding.

Riding forward with him through the crisp sunshine of mid-December, the
word "tragedy" still sounding in her ears, her thoughts reverted
naturally to the only tragedy besides her own which had ever come very
near to her--his own.

Could he have meant _that_? Did people mention such things after they
had happened? Did they not rather conceal them, hide them deeper and
deeper with the aid of time and the kindly years for a burial past all
recollection?

Troubled, uncomfortably intent on evading every thought or train of
ideas evoked, she put her mount to a gallop. But thought kept pace with
her.

She was, of course, aware of the situation regarding Selwyn's domestic
affairs; she could not very well have been kept long in ignorance of the
facts; so Nina had told her carefully, leaving in the young girl's mind
only a bewildered sympathy for man and wife whom a dreadful and
incomprehensible catastrophe had overtaken; only an impression of
something new and fearsome which she had hitherto been unaware of in the