Book 3 Chapter 1

There had been changes in Littlefield since that November evening on which the truth concerning the anonymous letters had come to light. After Tochatti's death it had naturally proved impossible altogether to hush up the tragedy and its immediate results, and although Anstice had done his best to mitigate the position for Major Carstairs and his wife, the inquest had proved a trying affair for all of them.

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.