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AJENDIE had bought the villa on his honeymoon, and in April, three months after his death, his widow went out there alone to spend the spring and early summer. Stuart, who had been in India at the time of Howard Majendie's death, wrote to Mrs. Majendie before starting for home and her reply awaited him at his club; he re-read it several times, looking curiously at her writing which he had never seen before. The name of the villa was familiar to him, Majendie had been speaking of it the last time they dined together; he said it had a garden full of lemon trees and big cypresses, and more fountains than you could imagine—it was these that Ellaline had loved. Stuart pictured Mrs. Majendie walking about among the lemon-trees in her widow's black.

In her letter she expressed a wish to see him—in a little while. "I shall be returning to England at the end of June; there is a good deal of business to go through, and