Afterwards

"You sent her money?"

"Yes. I sent what I could from my stipend--it wasn't much--God's ministers are supposed to be content with the promises of treasure in heaven," said Carey, with a hint of humour in his weak tone. "I made a little, too, by writing for the reviews. But it was precarious, Anstice, precarious; and I dared not risk dying, and leaving her in want."

"And now?" Anstice had noted the tense in which he spoke of his wife, and he guessed the answer before the other spoke.

"She is dead--she died three weeks ago," said Carey quietly. "And now I can give up the struggle myself----"

"I wish to God you had told me earlier," said Anstice vehemently. "At least I might have done something for you----"

"Oh, I had alleviations," said Carey slowly. "When the pain grew unendurable I had remedies which gave me some relief. But I knew that if I told you you would seek to persuade me to a course I really could not have adopted. You mustn't mind me saying it, Anstice. Perhaps I have been wrong all through." His voice was wistful. "But I did what I thought was right--and luckily for us poor men God judges us by our intentions, so to speak, and not by the results."

The words returned to Anstice's mind three days later as he stood by the graveside of his friend, and in his heart he wondered whether it were indeed true that what men called failure might, in the eyes of God, spell a great and glorious success.

* * * * *

The next person to leave Littlefield was Sir Richard Wayne. For since his daughter's wedding he had been finding life without her almost unbearable, and at length he avowed that the English climate in winter was altogether more than any sensible man could be expected to endure--a somewhat surprising statement from a former M.F.H.--and declared his intention of paying a visit to Iris and her husband in Egypt forthwith.

It was of Sir Richard Wayne that Anstice was thinking half an hour later when the Moldavia had come to her berth at the quay and he was about to leave the ship on which the short and prosperous voyage had been made.

However much the theory of the astral body of man may be denied or ridiculed, there is no doubt that an unusually vivid thought-presentment of a friend frequently precedes the appearance of that friend in the flesh, and it is certain that the mental image of Sir Richard Wayne had been, for some reason, so strongly before Anstice's mind that in a tall, grey-clad figure pushing his way vigorously through the crowd of natives he was inclined to see a striking resemblance to the object of his thoughts.