had almost too much to bear. It is a life like hers that makes you sometimes doubt God . . . a good woman like that deserves a better reward." She even had a letter from Moses Slade.
Only McTavish did not join in the pity. To him it seemed that the chain of her calamities was as inevitable as a Greek tragedy. It was not God, but Emma herself, who had created them. And he saw what the others did not, that Emma was by no means a broken woman.
And, after a time, she came even to create a certain glory out of Philip's death, for she found that people believed he had gone back to Megambo to take up his old work, and so had gone back to certain death and martyrdom. She did not disillusion them: it could not, surely, be wrong to let them believe that her Philip was a martyr. Philip, who must now be with God, would understand. And, sitting in church, she knew that people about her thought of him as her martyred son. He had not lived to be Bishop of East Africa, but he had died a martyr. . . .
There remained, however, one more blow. Two months after Philip's death, she received a second letter, in a strange handwriting, this time from Australia. As she opened it, there fell out a photograph on a picture postcard. It was the photograph of seven people, all of them strangers save Jason, who sat in the middle of the front row beside a large, rather coarse and plain woman, whose hand rested on his shoulder. At the bottom was written: "Upper row: Jason, Henry, Hector. Lower row: Bernice, old Jason, self and Emma."
