Jane put out her hand as if they had not met before that day, and Dick took the poor cold hand in his and held it tightly for a moment before he dropped it.
"D'you know what to-day is?" she asked abruptly. "I hadn't meant to remind you of it, Dick—dear, kind Dick. To-day is the twenty-fifth of October, the day my brother died."
He uttered an exclamation of dismay, self-rebuke. How could he have forgotten? So well had he remembered the date last year that he had written and urged Jane to come to Rede Place, and on her refusal to do so he had gone up to London for two or three days; together they had made the long, the interminable, journey to the suburban churchyard where Jack Oglander had been buried.
Wantele's mind went back six years to that melancholy, that sordid, scene in the prison infirmary. They had sent the sister away, reassured her, told her there was a change for the better. And then suddenly young Oglander had sunk—but he, Wantele, had been there, with him....
She was speaking again, in a low musing tone:—
"It's so strange——" she said, and then amended her words—"Isn't it strange that death is so material, so horribly real a thing? It seems so hard that there has to be so much fuss. If only one could slip away into nothingness how much better it would be, Dick—wouldn't it?"
Her mind swung back to her brother. There came a gentler, a softer tone in her sad voice.
"I wonder if you remember that you were the only one who did not bid me rejoice that Jack was dead. I have never forgotten that. And you were right, Dick. It was a great misfortune for me that he died. He would have been out of prison by now—and we should have been together, abroad——He was so clever, I think we should have been able to make some kind of life—and you would have come and stayed with us sometimes——But it's no use talking like that, is it? I know I'm foolish, unreasonable, to-day, and you are the only person to whom I ever talk of Jack."
She was putting up her dead brother as a shield between herself and her distress, and Wantele respected the poor subterfuge.
"I know, I know," he said feelingly.