Page:O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1919.pdf/39

Rh slipping away through the shrubbery, and he did not see her again.

So he came to his last morning at Bishopsthorpe; and as he dressed, he wished it could have been different; that he were not still conscious of that baffling wall of reserve between himself and Chev’s people, for whom, despite all, he had come to have a real affection.

In the breakfast-room he found them all assembled, and his last meal there seemed to him as constrained and difficult as any that had preceded it. It was over finally, however, and in a few minutes he would be leaving.

“I can never thank you enough for the splendid time I’ve had here,” he said as he rose. “I'll be seeing Chev to-morrow, and I’ll tell him all about everything.”

Then he stopped dead. With a smothered exclamation, old Sir Charles had stumbled to his feet, knocking over his chair, and hurried blindly out of the room; and Gerald said, “Mother!” in a choked appeal.

As if it were a signal between them, Lady Sherwood pushed her chair back a little from the table, her long delicate fingers dropped together loosely in her lap; she gave a faint sigh as if a restraining mantle slipped from her shoulders, and, looking up at the youth before her, her fine pale face lighted with a kind of glory, she said, “No, dear lad, no. You can never tell Chev, for he is gone.”

“Gone!” he cried.

“Yes,” she nodded back at him, just above a whisper; and now her face quivered, and the tears began to rush down her cheeks.

“Not dead!” he cried. “Not Chev—not that! O my God, Gerald, not that!”

“Yes,” Gerald said. “They got him two days after you left.”

It was so overwhelming, so unexpected and shocking, above all so terrible, that the friend he had so greatly loved and admired was gone out of his life forever,