Since the woman was dead there was no need to keep the authorship of those letters a secret, and before he left Littlefield Anstice had the satisfaction of knowing that Mrs. Carstairs' name had been effectually cleared from the slur placed upon it by a censorious and ignorant world.
When once this was accomplished Major Carstairs insisted on carrying off his wife and Cherry for a long holiday in the south of France, and although Cherry wept bitterly at the thought of parting from her beloved Anstice, he was able to console her by a recital of the wonderful things she would behold by the shores of the azure Mediterranean.
He was surprised to find, when the real parting came, how hard it was to say good-bye to his friends. Although he considered himself unsociable, independent of the claims of friendship, forced, so to speak, into misanthropy by the circumstances of his life, he had grown to have a real esteem for Chloe Carstairs, and the spectacle of her new-born vitality, her radiant happiness, was one which gave him a very deep and genuine pleasure. As for Cherry, that quaint child had long since twined herself round his heart-strings, and although Major Carstairs was, comparatively speaking, a new acquaintance, Anstice respected the soldier as an honest man and a gentleman.
A week after their departure another blow befell Anstice in the sudden death of his friend Fraser Carey, and when at last he was summoned in haste to Carey's aid he found that the latter had suffered for years from a painful internal disease.
"But why not have submitted to an operation years ago?" Anstice asked him gently as he sat, impotent to help, by his friend's side in the light of the dying day. "It might have been successful"--he dare not say more--"and you would have been spared years of agonizing suffering."
The other man smiled, and his eyes for a moment lost their look of pain.
"Quite so," he said gently, "but at the same time I might--probably should--have died. I took the best advice, nearly ruined myself with visiting specialists"--he smiled very faintly--"and none could give me any assurance that I should live through it. And I could not afford--then--to die."
"Not afford?" Anstice stared at him in amazement.
"No. You see"--his voice was a mere thread--"you see I had a wife, Anstice--oh, no one knows, and my secret is safe with you--and although I could not live with her ... she was not what the world calls a good woman, and her ideal of life was not one which I, as a clergyman, could assist her to realize--well, I could not let her sink altogether for want of money to keep some sort of home together."