She gave him his tea, and a pathetic smile. It was so pathetic that he looked away from it, and his eye fell upon the portrait of John Church, framed, near her on the table.
“Do you think it is a good one?” she asked eagerly, following his glance. “Do you think it does him justice? It was so difficult,” she added softly, “to do him justice.”
Sir Lewis Ancram stirred his tea vigorously. He never took sugar, but the manipulation of his spoon enabled him to say, with candid emphasis, “He never got justice.”
For the moment he would abandon his personal interest, he would humour her conscience; he would dwell upon the past, for the moment.
“No,” she said, “I think he never did. Perhaps, now——”
Ancram’s lip curled expressively.
“Yes, now,” he said—“now that no appreciation can encourage him, no applause stimulate him, now that he is for ever past it and them, they can find nothing too good to say of him. What a set of curs they are!”
“It is the old story,” she replied. Her eyes were full of sadness.
“Forgive me!” Ancram said involuntarily. Then he wondered for what he had asked to be forgiven.
“He was a martyr,” Judith went on calmly—“‘John Church, martyr,’ is the way they ought to write him down in the Service records. But there were a few people who knew him great and worthy while he lived. I was one——”