"Didn't you say you had some doc.u.ments you wanted me to sign?" she asked presently.

"Oh, yes; here is the thing," and he pulled a paper out of his pocket; "the lawyers write that it need not be witnessed."

Mary glanced at it. "Couldn't Morris have brought this?--he is your co-executor, isn't he?--and saved you the trouble?"

"Undoubtedly he could; but----"

"But what?"

"Well, if you want to know, my dear," said the Colonel, with a grave countenance, "just now Morris is in a state in which I do not care to leave more of this important business in his hands than is necessary."

"What am I to understand by that, uncle?" she said, looking at him shrewdly. "Do you mean that he is--not quite well?"

"Yes, Mary, I mean that--he is not quite well; that is, if my observation goes for anything. I mean," he went on with quiet vehemence, "I mean that--just at present, of course, he has been so upset by this miserable affair that for my part I wouldn't put any confidence in what he says about it, or about anything else. The thing has got upon his nerves and rendered him temporarily unfit for the business of ordinary life. You know that at the best of times he is a very peculiar man and not quite like other people.

"Well, have you signed that? Thank you, my dear. By Jove! I must be off; I shall be late as it is. I may rely upon your discretion as to what we have been talking about, may I not? but I thought it as well to let you know how the land lay."

"Yes, uncle; and thank you for taking so much trouble."

When the door had closed behind him Mary reflected awhile. Then she said to herself:

"He thinks Morris is a little off his head, and has come here to warn me. I should not be surprised, and I daresay that he is right. Any way, a new trouble has risen up between us, the shadow of another woman, poor thing. Well, shadows melt, and the dead do not come back. She seems to have been very charming and clever, and I daresay that she fascinated him for a while, but with kindness and patience it will all come right. Only I do hope that he will not insist upon making me too many confidences."

So thought Mary, who by nature was forgiving, gentle, and an optimist; not guessing how sorely her patience as an affianced wife, and her charity as a woman of the world, would be tried within the hour.

From all of which it will be seen that for once the diplomacy of the Colonel had prospered somewhat beyond its deserts. The departed cannot explain or defend themselves, and Morris's possible indiscretions already stood discounted in the only quarter where they might do harm.

Half an hour later Mary, sitting beside the fire with her toes upon the grate and her face to the window, perceived Morris on the gravel drive, wearing a preoccupied and rather wretched air. She noted, moreover, that before he rang the bell he paused for a moment as though to shake himself together.

"Here you are at last," she said, cheerfully, as he bent down to kiss her, "seven whole minutes before your time, which is very nice of you.

Now, sit down there and get warm, and we will have a good, long talk."

Morris obeyed. "My father has been lunching with you, has he not?" he said somewhat nervously.

"Yes, dear, and telling me all the news, and a sad budget it seems to be; about the dreadful disasters of the great gale and the death of that poor girl who was staying with you, Miss Fregelius."

At the mention of this name Morris's face contorted itself, as the face of a man might do who was seized with a sudden pang of sharp and unexpected agony.

"Mary," he said, in a hoa.r.s.e and broken voice, "I have a confession to make to you, and I must make it--about this dead woman, I mean. I will not sail under false colours; you must know all the truth, and then judge."

"Dear me," she answered; "this sounds dreadfully tragic. But I may as well tell you at once that I have already heard some gossip."

"I daresay; but you cannot have heard all the truth, for it was known only to me and her."

Now, do what she would to prevent it, her alarm showed itself in Mary's eyes.

"What am I to understand?" she said in a low voice--and she looked a question.

"Oh, no!" he answered with a faint smile; "nothing at all----"

"Not that you have been embracing her, for instance? That, I understand, is Eliza Layard's story."

"No, no; I never did such a thing in my life."

A little sigh of relief broke from Mary's lips. At the worst this was but an affair of sentiment.

"I think, dear" she said in her ordinary slow voice, "that you had better set out the trouble in your own words, with as few details as possible, or none at all. Such things are painful, are they not--especially where the dead are concerned?"

Morris bowed his head and began: "You know I found her on the ship, singing as she only could sing, and she was a very strange and beautiful woman--perhaps beautiful is not the word--"

"It will do," interrupted Mary; "at any rate, you thought her beautiful."

"Then afterwards we grew intimate, very intimate, without knowing it, almost--indeed, I am not sure that we should ever have known it had it not been for the mischief-making of Eliza Layard----"

"May she be rewarded," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mary.

"Well, and after she--that is, Eliza Layard--had spoken to my father, he attacked Mr. Fregelius, his daughter, and myself, and it seems that she confessed to my father that she was--was----"

"In love with you--not altogether unnatural, perhaps, from my point of view; though, of course, she oughtn't to have been so."

"Yes, and said that she was going away and--on Christmas Eve we met there in the Dead Church. Then somehow--for I had no intention of such a thing--all the truth came out, and I found that I was no longer master of myself, and--G.o.d forgive me! and you, Mary, forgive me, too--that I loved her also."

"And afterwards?" said Mary, moving her skirts a little.

"And afterwards--oh! it will sound strange to you--we made some kind of compact for the next world, a sort of spiritual marriage; I can call it nothing else. Then I shook hands with her and went away, and in a few hours she was dead--dead. But the compact stands, Mary; yes, that compact stands for ever."

"A compact of a spiritual marriage in a place where there is no marriage. Do you mean, Morris, that you wish this strange proceeding to destroy your physical and earthly engagement to myself?"

"No, no; nor did she wish it; she said so. But you must judge. I feel that I have done you a dreadful wrong, and I was determined that you should know the worst."

"That was very good of you," Mary said, reflectively, "for really there is no reason why you should have told me this peculiar story. Morris, you have been working pretty hard lately, have you not?"

"Yes," he replied, absently, "I suppose I have."

"Was this young lady what is called a mystic?"

"Perhaps. Danish people often are. At any rate, she saw things more clearly than most. I mean that the future was nearer to her mind; and in a sense, the past also."

"Indeed. You must have found her a congenial companion. I suppose that you talked a good deal of these things?"

"Sometimes we did."

"And discovered that your views were curiously alike? For when one mystic meets another mystic, and the other mystic has beautiful eyes and sings divinely, the spiritual marriage will follow almost as a matter of course. What else is to be expected? But I am glad that you were faithful to your principles, both of you, and clung fast to the ethereal side of things."

Morris writhed beneath this satire, but finding no convenient answer to it, made none.

"Do you remember, my dear?" went on Mary, "the conversation we had one day in your workshop before we were engaged--that's years ago, isn't it--about star-gazing considered as a fine art?"

"I remember something," he said.