"Come, Mrs. Carstairs, you mustn't talk nonsense of that kind!" His tone was bracing. "You were not in the least to blame. If anyone was, I should be the person, seeing I did not warn you of this possibility. But you know the poor soul was a very determined woman; and if she had set her mind on self-destruction she would have carried out her intention somehow."
"Well, at least there will be no object in keeping the authorship of those confounded letters a secret now," said Major Carstairs, putting his hand kindly on his wife's arm. "After all poor Tochatti has done us a service by her death which will go far towards wiping out the injury of her life. And now it is one o'clock, and we none of us had much sleep last night——"
"You're right," said Anstice quickly, "and Mrs. Carstairs looks worn out. Can't you persuade her to go to bed, Major Carstairs? There is really no need for her to stay here harrowing her feelings another moment."
"I'll go," she said at once. "Good-night again, Dr. Anstice. It will comfort me to know that you don't think me entirely to blame—for this."
"I think you are as innocent in this matter as in that other one we discussed to-night," he said quietly. "And this poor woman here, if, as we may surely believe, she has regained by now the sanity she may have temporarily lost, would be the last to think any but kindly thoughts of you in the light of her fuller humanity."
"Thank you," she said again, as she had said it earlier in the evening; and once more they exchanged the firm and cordial handshake by which those who are truly friends seal their parting.
When he had closed the door behind her he came back to the bedside where Major Carstairs still stood, looking down on the dead woman with an unfathomable expression in his eyes.
"Anstice, from the bottom of my heart I regret the manner of this poor soul's passing," he said, and his voice was genuinely moved. "But even so I can't altogether regret that she took this way of cutting the knot. For now my wife and I may at least hope for the ordinary happiness which other human beings know. We have been in the shadow a long time, Chloe and I"—he spoke half to himself—"but now we may surely pray for sunshine for the rest of our earthly pilgrimage together."
"Amen to that," said Anstice solemnly; and as the two men shook hands silently each rejoiced, in his individual fashion, that Chloe Carstairs had come into her own at last.