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“It would, no doubt, be convenient to have, as soon as possible, an indication of her – ”

“Naturally. I’ll speak to her, and let you know her views as soon as possible. It is a large sum, as you say. She may desire to take time for consideration.” I knew that she would not take five minutes.

“I may tell you – without breach of confidence, I think – that our lamented friend was at first disposed to confine his benefaction, in the event of its becoming operative by his wife’s renunciation, to distinctly ecclesiastical charities. I allowed myself the liberty – the honor – of suggesting to him a wider scope. ‘Why be sectional?’ I suggested. ‘The gratitude, the remembrance, of all your fellow citizens – that would be a greater thing, Don Arsenio,’ I permitted myself to say. And the idea appealed to him.”

“Really, then,” I remarked, “Venice is hardly less indebted to you – Venice as a whole, I mean – than to poor Arsenio himself!”

“No, no, I couldn’t allow that to be said. But I’m proud if I, in any way, had a humble – ”

“Exactly. And if that comes out – and surely why shouldn’t it? – everybody will be very grateful to you – except perhaps the distinctly ecclesiastical charities! By the way, do you know this Father Garcia? He’s living in this house, on the first floor, and we called him in to see Arsenio – last night, you know, – before he died.”

“I don’t know Father Garcia personally,” he said stiffly, “but very well by repute.” He paused; I waited to see what he would say of Father Garcia. “An utter reactionary, a black reactionary, and none too good an Italian.” He lowered his voice and whispered, “Strongly suspected of Austrian sympathies!”

“I see,” I replied gravely. He had almost got even with the old priest’s “pestilent.”

He rose and bade me a ceremonious farewell. As he went out, he said, “This bequest – and whether it comes into operation or not, it must receive publicity – coming from a member of the old reactionary nobility – from a Spanish Catholic – may well be considered to mark a stage in the growing solidarity of Italy.”

That seemed as much as even Arsenio himself could have expected of it!

CHAPTER XXV
HOMAGE

LUCINDA’S mental idiosyncrasy resisted any attempt at idealization; for all that she had accused me of making the attempt. Though she would not persist in cruelty, and would remove herself from the temptation to it when once she had realized what it was, yet she could be, and had been, cruel. In like manner she could be hard and callous, very inaccessible to sentimentality, to that obvious appeal to the emotions which takes its strength from our common humanity, with its common incidents – its battle, murder, and sudden death – and so on. She did not accept these things at their face value, or in what one may call their universal aspect. In her inner mind – she was not very articulate, or at all theoretical, about it – but in her inner mind she seemed to re-value each of such incidents by an individual and personal standard which, in its coolness and intellectual detachment, certainly approached what most of us good human creatures – so ready to cry, as we are so ready to laugh – would call a degree of callousness. There was a considerable clear-sightedness in this disposition of hers, but also fully that amount of error which (as I suppose) our own personality always introduces into our judgments of people. We see them through our own spectacles, which sometimes harden and sometimes soften the outlines of the objects regarded – among which is included the wearer of the spectacles.

She had loved Arsenio once; she had cleaved unto him with a fidelity to which – in these days – her own word “primitive” must be allowed to be the most obviously applicable; remorse had smitten her over her cruelty to him. All the same, in a measure she erred about him, judging his love solely by the standard of his conduct, his romance in the light of his frivolity and shamelessness, his sensibility by his failure adequately to understand a subtle and specialized sensibility in herself. That, at least, was the attitude to which her years of association with him – now intimate, now distant and aloof – had brought her. It was not, of course, to be attributed in anything like its entirety to the girl whom he had kissed at Cragsfoot, or whom he had loved at Venice, or carried off from Waldo. Her final judgment of him was the result of what is called, in quite another connection, a progressive revelation.

Thus it happened that his tragic death was – to put it moderately – no more tragic to her than it was to me his friend rather by circumstances than choice or taste, by interest and amusement more than by affection. She took him at his word, so to say, and accepted the note of ironical comedy which he himself was responsible for importing into the occurrence. Keen-eyed for that aspect, and in a bitter way keenly appreciative of it, she was blind to any other, and indeed reluctant to try to see it – almost afraid that, even dead, he might befool her again, still irremediably suspicious that he was deceiving her by lies and posturings. As a result, she was really and truly – in the depths of her soul – unmoved by the catastrophe, and not unamused by the trappings with which Arsenio had be-draped it – or, rather, his previously rehearsed but never actually presented, version of it.

For the outside observer – comparatively outside, anyhow – and for the amateur of comedy and its material – human foibles, prejudices, ambitions – there was amusement to be had. As soon as Lucinda’s decision to renounce the inheritance – except the palazzo which, as she observed to me, had been honestly come by, and honestly preserved by being let out in lodgings – Arsenio’s last will and testament became an animated topic of the day – and a rather controversial one. The clericals and their journals – Signor Panizzi’s black reactionaries and pro-Austrians – paid lip-service to the ten thousand lire for masses, but could not refrain from some surprise at the choice of trustees which the lamented Don Arsenio – a good Catholic and of old noble stock – had made (the trustees were all pestilent, as I had suspected); while the other side – the patriots, the enlightened, the radicals, the pestilents, while most gratefully acknowledging his munificence, and belauding the eminent gentlemen to whom he had confided his trust, pointed out with satisfaction how the spirit of progress and enlightenment had proved too strong in the end even for a man of Don Arsenio’s clerical antecedents and proclivities. As for Signor Panizzi, both sides agreed that his finger had been in the pie; his position as first and dominating trustee was for the one a formidable menace to, and for the other a sufficient guarantee of, a wise, beneficial, and honest administration of the fund.

Under the spur of this public interest and discussion, Don Arsenio’s funeral assumed considerable dimensions, and was in fact quite an affair – with a sprinkling of “Blacks,” a larger sprinkling of “pestilents,” a big crowd of curious Venetian citizens, a religious service of much pomp conducted by Father Garcia, followed at the graveside (the priests and the “Blacks” having withdrawn with significant ceremony) by a fiery panegyric from Signor Panizzi. Altogether, when I next go to Venice, I shall not be surprised to see a statue of Arsenio there; I hope that the image will wear a smile on its face – a smile of his old variety.

Lucinda did not attend the ceremony; it would have been too much for her feelings – for some of her feelings, at all events. But to my surprise I saw Godfrey Frost there. I had been thrust, against my will, into the position of one of the chief mourners; he kept himself more in the background, and did not join me until the affair was finished. Then we extricated ourselves from the crowd as soon as we could, and made our way back together, ending up by sitting down to a cup of coffee on the Piazza. I had seen and heard nothing of him since his disordered exit from my apartment, just before the catastrophe. I had indeed been inclined to conclude that he had left Venice and, not thinking that his condolences would be well received, had left none behind him. But here he was – and in a gloomy and disgruntled state of mind, as it seemed. He had been thinking things over, no doubt – with the natural conclusion that he had not got much profit or pleasure out of the whole business, out of that acquaintance with the Valdez’s, which he had once pursued so ardently.

“I didn’t choose to seem to run away,” he told me, “in case there was any investigation, or a trial, or anything of that kind. Besides” – he added this rather reluctantly – “I had a curiosity to see the last of the fellow. But they tell me I shan’t be wanted, as things have turned out, and I’m off to-morrow – going home, Julius.”

There was evidently more that he wanted to say. I smoked in silence.

“I don’t want to see Lucinda – Madame Valdez,” he blurted out, after a pause. “But I wish you’d just say that I’m sorry if I annoyed her. I’ve made a fool of myself; I’m pretty good at business; but a fool outside it – so far, at least. I don’t understand what she was up to, but – well, I’m willing to suppose – ”

I helped him out. “You’re willing to give a lady the benefit of the doubt? It’s usual, you know. I’ve very little doubt that she’ll make friends with you now, if you like.”

He turned to me with a smile, rather sour, yet shrewd. “Would you think that good enough yourself?”

At first I thought that he was questioning me as to the state of my own affections. But the words which he immediately added – in a more precise definition of his question – showed that he was occupied with his own more important case. “In my place – situated as I am, you know?”

As a result of shock, or of meditation thereupon, or of contemplation of the lamentable life and death of Arsenio Valdez, Mr. Godfrey Frost was becoming himself again! I do not think that the Wesleyan strain had anything to do with the matter at this stage. It was the Frost business instinct that had revived, the business view. Godfrey might have counted the world well lost for Lucinda’s love – at all events, well risked; business-risked, so to put it. But not for the mere friendship, the hope of which I had held out to him. “In my place – situated as I am.” The phrases carried a good deal to me, a tremendous lot to him. The world – such a world as his – was not to be lost, or bartered, for less than a full recompense. After all, whoever did talk of losing his world for friendship? Most people think themselves meritorious if they lose a hundred pounds on that score. And Godfrey had in all likelihood – the precise figures were unknown – already dropped a good deal more than that, and had taken in return little but hard words and buffeting. No wonder the Frost instinct looked suspiciously at any further venture! Not of actual money, of course; that stood only as a symbol; and to be even an adequate symbol would have required immense multiplication. If a symbol were to be used in any seriousness, the old one served best – the old personification of all that he, in an hour of urgent impulse, had been willing to lose or to risk for Lucinda.

“Well, my dear fellow,” I said urbanely, “there were always circumstances, to which we needn’t refer in detail, that made any intimate acquaintance between you and the Valdez’s – well, difficult. Affectation to deny it! I’ve even felt it myself; of course in a minor degree.”

“Why a minor degree?” he asked rather aggressively. “If I’m Nina’s cousin, you’re Waldo’s!”

“There’s all the difference,” I said decisively, though I was not at all prepared to put the difference into words. However, I made a weak and conventional effort: “Old Waldo’s so happy now that he can’t bear any malice – ”

He cut across the lame inadequacy of this explanation (not that there wasn’t a bit of truth in it).

“I’m damned rich,” he observed moodily, “and everybody behaves to me as if I was damned important – except you and the Valdez’s, of course. But I’m not free. Let’s have a liqueur to wash down that coffee, shall we?”

I agreed, and we had one. It was not a moment to refuse him creature comforts.

“I’m part of the concern,” he resumed, after a large sip. “And jolly lucky to be, of course – I see that. But it limits what one may call one’s independence. It doesn’t matter a hang what you do, Julius (This to me, London representative of Coldston’s!) – Oh, privately, I mean, of course. But with me, private life – well, family life, I mean – and business are so infernally mixed up together. Nina can’t absolutely give me the sack, but it would be infernally inconvenient not to be on terms with her.” He paused, and added impressively: “It might in the end break up the business.”

One might as well think of breaking up the great Pyramid or Mount Popocatepetl! Too large an order even for an age of revolution!

“But you and Nina have nothing to quarrel about,” I expostulated – dishonestly.

He eyed me, again smiling sourly. “Oh, come, you know better than that!” his smile said, though his tongue didn’t. “And, besides, it would upset that idea that she and I talked over, and that rather particularly attracted me. I think I spoke to you about it? About Cragsfoot, you know.”

“Have you heard from Lady Dundrannan lately?” I inquired.

“No – not since I left the Villa.” He made this admission rather sulkily.

“Ah, then you’re not up-to-date! Cragsfoot’s all arranged. I’m to have it.” And I told him about the family arrangement.

Here I must confess to a bit of malicious triumph. The things envisaged itself to me as a fight between Rillington and Frost, and Rillington had won. Waldo’s old allegiance had resisted complete absorption. But my feeling was – at the moment – rather ungenerous; he was a good deal humbled already.

He took the disappointment very well. “Well, it was a fancy of mine, but of course you ought to have the first call, if Waldo sells out. So you’ll be living at Cragsfoot after Sir Paget’s death?” He appeared to ruminate over this prospect.

“Yes – and I hope to be there a good deal of my time, even before that.”

“With Nina and Waldo for your neighbors at Briarmount?”

“Of course. Why not? What do you mean? I shall see you there too sometimes, I hope.”

“I hope you’ll get on well with her.” He was smiling still, though in a moody, malicious way – as one is apt to smile when contemplating the difficulties or vexations of others. “You and your family,” he added the next moment. And with that he rose from his chair. “No good asking you to dine to-night, I suppose?” I shook my head. “No, you’ll have to be on hand, of course! Well, good-by, then. I’m off early to-morrow.” He held out his hand. “It’ll interest Nina to hear about all this.” He waved his hand round Venice, but no doubt he referred especially to the death and burial of the eminent Don Arsenio Valdez.

“Pray give her my best regards. Pave the way for me as a neighbor, Godfrey!”

“Taking everything together, it’ll need a bit of smoothing, perhaps.” He nodded to me, and strolled away across the Piazza.

His words had given me material for a half-amused, half-scared reflection – the mood which the neighborhood of Lady Dundrannan – and much more the possibility of any conflict with Lady Dundrannan – always aroused in me. Sir Paget’s letter had reflected – in a humor slightly spiced with restiveness – the present relations between Cragsfoot and Briarmount. What would they be with me in residence, and presently in possession? With me and my family there, as Godfrey Frost said? My family which did not exist at present!

But I did not sit there reflecting. I paid for our refreshments – Godfrey, in his preoccupation, had omitted even to offer to do so – and went back to the palazzo. Old Amedeo waylaid me in the hall and told me that Donna Lucinda had requested me to pay her a visit as soon as I returned from the funeral; but he prevented me from obeying her invitation for a few minutes. He was in a state of exultation that had to find expression.

“Ah, what a funeral! You saw me there? No! But I was, of course. A triumph! The name of Valdez will stand high in Venice henceforth! Oh, I don’t like Panizzi and that lot, any more than Father Garcia does. My sympathies are clerical. None the less, it was remarkable! Alas, what wouldn’t Don Arsenio have done if he hadn’t been cut off in his youth!”

That was a question which I felt – and feel – quite incapable of answering, save in the most general and non-committal terms. “Something astonishing!” I said with a nod, as I dodged past the broad barrier of Amedeo’s figure and succeeded in reaching the staircase.

Right up to the top of the tall old house I had to go this time – past Father Garcia and his noble “Black” friends, past the scene of the banquet and the scene of the catastrophe. I think that Lucinda must have been listening for my steps; she opened the door herself before I had time to knock on it.

She was back in the needlewoman’s costume now – her black frock, with her shawl about her shoulders. Perhaps this attire solved the problem of mourning in the easiest way; or perhaps it was a declaration of her intentions. I did not wait to ask myself that; the expression of her face caught my immediate attention. It was one of irrepressible amusement – of the eager amusement which seeks to share itself with another appreciative soul. She caught me by the hand, and drew me in, leading me through the narrow passage to the door of her sitting room – much of a replica of Arsenio’s on the floor below, though the ceiling was less lofty and the windows narrower.

Then I saw what had evoked the expression on her face. Between the windows, propped up against the discolored old hangings on the wall, stood the largest wreath of immortelles which I have ever seen on or off a grave, in or out of a shop window; and, occupying about half of the interior of the circle, there was a shield, or plaque, of purple velvet – Oh, very sumptuous! – bearing an inscription in large letters of gold:

“To the Illustrious Donna Lucinda Valdez and to the Immortal Memory of the Illustrious Señor Don Arsenio Valdez, the City and Citizens of Venice offer Gratitude and Homage.”

“Isn’t it – tremendous?” whispered Lucinda, her arm now in mine.

“It certainly is some size,” I admitted, eyeing the creation ruefully.

“No, no! The whole thing, I mean! Arsenio himself! Oh, how I should like to tell them the truth!”

“The funeral too was – tremendous,” I remarked. “But I suppose Amedeo’s told you?”

“Yes, he has! Also Father Garcia, who paid me a visit of condolence. And a number of Arsenio’s noble friends have sent condolences by stately, seedy menservants. Oh, and those trustees have left their cards, of course! Panizzi and the others!”

All this time we had been standing arm in arm, opposite the portentous monument of grief, gratitude, and homage. Now Lucinda withdrew her hand from my arm, and sank into a chair.

“I’m having fame thrust upon me! I’m being immortalized. The munificent widow of the munificent Arsenio Valdez! I’m becoming a public character! Oh, he is having his revenge on me, isn’t he? Julius, I can’t stand it! I must fly from Venice!”

My attention stuck on the monstrous wreath. “What are you going to do with that?”

“I wonder if there would ever be a dark enough night to tie a flat-iron to it, steal out with it round our necks, and drop it in the Grand Canal!” Lucinda speculated wistfully.

CHAPTER XXVI
THE AIR ON THE COAST

“AND did a dark enough night ever come, Julius?” Sir Paget asked with a chuckle.

It was late summer. I had arrived that day to pay him a visit and, incidentally, to complete the transaction by which Waldo was to convey to me the reversion to Cragsfoot. My uncle and I sat late together after dinner, while I regaled him with the story of the last days of Arsenio Valdez – of his luck, his death, and his glorification.

“Alas, sir, such things can’t actually happen in this world. They’re dreams – Platonic ideas laid up in heaven – inward dispositions towards things which can’t be literally translated into action! We did it in our souls. But, no; the wreath doesn’t, in bare and naked fact, lie at the bottom of the Grand Canal. It hangs proudly in the hall of Palazzo Valdez, the apple of his eye to fat old Amedeo, with whom Lucinda left it in charge – a pledge never likely to be demanded back – when she leased the palazzo to him. He undertakes the upkeep and expenses, pays her about two hundred a year for it, and expects to do very well by letting out the apartments. He considers that the wreath will add prestige to the place and enhance its letting value. Besides, he’s genuinely very proud of it, and the Valdez legend loses nothing in his hands, I assure you.”

“It’s a queer story. And that’s the end of it, is it? Because it’s nearly six months since our friend the Monkey, as you boys used to call him, played his last throw – and won!”

“There’s very little more to tell. As you know, Sir Ezekiel’s death sent me on my travels once again – to the States and South America; I was appointed Managing Director, and had to go inspecting, and reorganizing, and so forth. That’s all settled. I’m established now in town – and here, thank God, I am – at old Cragsfoot again!”

“You’ve certainly been a good deal mixed up in the affair – by fate or choice,” he said, smiling, “but you’re not the hero, are you? Arsenio claims that rôle! Or the heroine! What of her, Julius?”

“She came back to England four or five months ago. She’s living in rooms at Hampstead. She’s got the palazzo rent, and she still does her needlework; she gets along pretty comfortably.”

“You’ve seen her since you came back, I suppose?”

“Yes, pretty nearly every day,” I answered. “She was the first person I went to see when I got back to London; she was the last person I saw before I left London this morning.”

He sat rubbing his hands together, and looking into the bright fire of logs that his old body found pleasant now, even on summer evenings; the wind blows cold off the sea very often at Cragsfoot.

“You’re telling me the end of the story now, aren’t you, Julius?”

“Yes, I hope and think so. Indeed, why shouldn’t I say that I know it? I think that we both knew from the hour of Arsenio’s death. We had been too much together – too close in spirit through it all – for anything else. How could we say good-by and go our separate ways after all that? It would have seemed to us both utterly unnatural. First, my head had grown full of her – in those talks at Ste. Maxime that I told you we’d had; and, when a woman’s concerned, the heart’s apt to follow the head, isn’t it?”

“I don’t wonder at either head or heart. She was a delightful child; she seems to have grown into a beautiful woman – yes, she would have – and one that might make a man think about her. There was nothing between you while he lived? No, I don’t ask that question, I’ve no right to – and, I think, no need to.”

“With her there couldn’t have been; it was as impossible as it proved in the end for her to marry Waldo. For her it was a virtue in me that I knew it.”

“She wasn’t married to Arsenio Valdez when she ran away from Waldo?”

“In her own eyes she was, and when he called her – called her back – well, she had to go.”

“Ah, I’ve sometimes fancied that there might have been some untold history like that.”

“She now wishes that you and Waldo – just you two – should know that there was. Will you tell him, sir? I’d rather not. She thinks it may make you and him feel more gently to her; she’s proud herself, you know, and was sorry to wound others in their pride.”

“It’s generous of her. I’ll tell him – what I must; and you need tell me no more than you have. I shouldn’t wonder if the idea isn’t quite new to him either. There are – quarters – from which something of the sort may have been suggested, eh, Julius?”

“I know nothing as to that, but, as you say, it’s very possible. You’ll have gathered how the feelings of these two ladies towards one another runs through the whole business. And we’re not finished with them yet. Before Waldo sets his hand to that agreement, he must know that the arrangement which is to bring me to Cragsfoot will bring Lucinda there too.”

“Yes, as its mistress; even in my lifetime, if she so pleases; after me, in any case.” He looked across to me, smiling. “And the moment so difficult – the more difficult because it’s otherwise so triumphant! The Heir-Apparent is born – a month ago – I wrote you about it. The dynasty is assured; Her Majesty is at her grandest and – I will add – her most gracious. I saw her about again for the first time the day before yesterday, and she said to me, ‘Now I’m really content, Sir Paget!’ – implying, as it seemed to me, that the subject world ought to be content also. All the Court was there – the Heir itself, our dear old Prince Consort, the Grand Vizier – forgive me mixing East and West, but that seems to be the sort of position which she assigns to young Godfrey Frost; an exalted but precarious position, with a throne on one hand, and a bowstring on the other! Oh, yes, and there was a Lady-in-Waiting into the bargain, a pretty girl called Eunice Something-or-other.”

“Oh, yes, she was at Villa San Carlo – Eunice Unthank,” said I, smiling. Nina – pertinacious as a limpet!

“And now we’re to come breaking in on this benevolent despotism! Our schemes border on conspiracy, don’t they?” He grew graver, though he still smiled whimsically. “A reconciliation possible?” he suggested doubtfully.

I laughed. “There’s a crowning task for your diplomacy, Sir Paget!”

“If I could change the hearts of women, I should be a wizard, not a diplomatist. Their feuds have a grand implacability beside which the quarrels of nations are trivial and transient affairs. In this matter, I’m a broken reed – don’t lean upon me, Julius! And could you answer for your side – for your fair belligerent?”

“Lucinda makes war by laughing,” said I, laughing myself. “But – well, I think she would go on laughing, you know.”

“Just what my Lady Dundrannan always hates, and occasionally suspects – even in me!”

“I wish to blazes that Waldo would have one of his old rages, and tell her it’s not her business!”

“I daresay he may wish you hadn’t taken so much interest in his runaway fiancée,” was Sir Paget’s pertinent retort. “No, he’ll have no rages; like you, I sometimes regret it. If she vetoes, he’ll submit.” He shook his head. “Here are we poor men up against these grand implacabilities; they transcend our understanding and mock our efforts. Even Arsenio, the great Arsenio, though he made use of them, tripped up over them in the end! What can you and I, and poor Waldo, do?” He got up. “I’ll write a line to Waldo on the point – on the two points – to-night; and send it up by the car to-morrow; he can let us know his answer before Stannard is due here, with the deeds, in the afternoon. There might even be time to telephone and stop him from starting, if the answer’s a veto!”

Diplomatist though Sir Paget was, man of affairs as I must assume myself to be – or where stands the firm of Coldston’s? – our judgments were clumsy, our insight at fault; we did no justice to the fine quality of Lady Dundrannan’s pride. It was not to be outdone by the pride of the needlewoman of Cimiez – outwardly, at all events; and do not many tell us that wholly to conquer, or even conceal, such emotions as fear and self-distrust is a moral triumph, where not to feel them is a mere fluke of nature – just the way one happens to be concocted? The only answer that came to Sir Paget’s no doubt very delicately, diplomatically expressed note, came over the telephone (Sir Paget had not trusted its secrecy!), from butler to butler. Marsden at Briarmount told Critcher at Cragsfoot that he was to inform Sir Paget that Colonel Rillington said it was all right about this afternoon. Critcher delivered the message as Sir Paget and I were sitting in the garden before lunch – on that bench by the garden door whereon Lucinda had once sat, listening fearfully to the quarrel of angry youths.

“Very well, Critcher,” said Sir Paget indifferently. But when the man had gone, he turned to me and said, with a tremor in his voice, “So you can come, you see – you and Lucinda, Julius.” I had not known till then how much he wanted us. “I say, what would poor old Aunt Bertha have said? She went over, bag and baggage!”

“She’d have come back – with the same impedimenta,” I declared, laughing.

There was a stateliness in Lady Dundrannan’s assent, given by her presence and countenance to the arrangement which the allied family of the Rillingtons had – well, I suppose Waldo had – submitted to her approval. The big Briarmount car – even bigger, more newly yellow, than the car of Cimiez – brought down the whole bunch – all the Court, as Sir Paget had called it. Briarmount’s approval was almost overwhelmingly signified. It was not, of course, the thing to mention Lucinda – that was unofficial; perhaps, moreover, slightly shameful. Godfrey, at least, wore an embarrassed air which the ostensible character of the occasion did not warrant; and little Lady Eunice – I suspected that the information had filtered down to her through the other three of them – seemed to look at me with something of the reproachful admiration one reserves for a dare-devil. Waldo, for his part, gave my hand a hard, though surreptitious, squeeze, smiling into my eyes with his old kindness, somehow conveying an immense deal to me about how he for his part felt about the implacabilities, and the way they had affected his life – and now mine. Of course I was myself in the mood to perceive – to exaggerate, or even to imagine – such thoughts in him; but there it was – his eyes traveled from my face to his lady’s shapely back (she was putting Mr. Stannard, the lawyer, at his ease – he was a cadet of an old county family, and one of the best known sportsmen in the neighborhood), and back to my face again, and – well, certainly the situation was not lost on Waldo. But it was only after our business was finished – a short recital of the effect of the deeds from Stannard – didn’t we know more than he did about that? But no doubt it was proper – and then the signatures (“Dundrannan” witnessing in a fine, bold, decisive hand!) – that he said a word to me. “God give you and yours happiness with the old place, Julius!” The pang of parting from it spoke there, as well as kindliness and forgiveness for us.