of all. She had been standing when she undid the things; she left the
ring and the photograph on the table, and she sank into a chair near the
fire holding the bit of paper. The tone of it astonished and confused
her. It was more the stern moralist asking to be forgiven for doing
right than the guilty husband asking for mercy in her thoughts of him.

"Yes," thought Rose at length, "that is because she was his wife, and
when he came to face death it was the great wrong of infidelity to her
that haunted him. I must have seemed almost a partner in the wrong."

Again the confused sense of guilt seized her, the horrible possibility
of having been a wife only in name. She did not weigh the matter calmly
enough to feel quite as distinctly as she ought to have done that she
could not be touched or denied in the faintest degree by a sin that was
not her sin. Still she raised her head as she could not have done some
weeks before; for the most acute phase of her trial had been faced and
had been passed. Now in her moments of most bitter pain in the very
depths of her soul was peace. As she became calmer she tried again to
connect together those three parts of the message from the battle-field,
the ring, the photograph, and the letter; but she could not do so. At
last she put them away in the drawer of her bureau, and then wrote to
tell her mother and the lawyer that Sir David had sent her a photograph,
a ring, and a few private lines--that was all. There was no will.

Still everything had not been brought back. There had been portmanteaux
sent down to Capetown, and there might yet be discovered a small
despatch box, or a writing case, something or other that might hold a
will. But the limit of time was reached at last; the portmanteaux and a
despatch box were recovered, but they held no will.