"I don't know where to begin. How much do you know?"
"I heard of the wedding," said Austin, taking off his cap and letting the spring breeze fan his heated brow.
"I do wish with all my heart that it had been your wedding," said Jockie viciously. "I wish with all my heart I had never tried to do you a good turn. I don't know what possessed me to do it. It was only to spite her. I have brought disaster to everyone."
"What the d—dickens have you to do with it?" asked Austin.
Jockie told him of the episode outside the post office.
"She came back from her honeymoon determined to slight and insult the Admiral and Sidney all she could. Oh, I can't tell it all to you; it would take too long. She began to be mistress before she married, so you can imagine what it was like afterwards. She has always hated Sidney, and she couldn't forgive the Admiral for not being smitten by her charms, and falling down and worshipping her, as all the rest of you did."
"But," interrupted Austin, "the Admiral isn't it a fool. Surely he can be master in his own house?"
"No, the Admiral isn't a fool," said Jockie solemnly, "he is now a saint in heaven."
Austin stopped still in the middle of the road. "You don't mean to tell me that the dear old chap is dead?"
"She killed him—murdered him—just as surely as if she had shot him. Do let me tell the story in my own way. I hardly know the ins and outs of it, but it seems that the house really belongs to Major Urquhart—at least, she gives out that it does, and your mother told me that the Admiral would not fight his brother about it, but that it was morally, if not legally, his. Mrs. Ted has turned Sidney out of her place at the head of the table. She took the reins of the whole house in her own hands; she moved and changed everything in it on purpose to annoy them. She took the Admiral's books and pictures away from his study, and said they belonged to the Major, and she furnished a new smoking-room with all his treasured things. The Admiral and Sidney at last, in despair, went up to London. They were driven out of the house by her. When they came back she was worse than ever. She had cut down all the Admiral's favourite trees, and in spite of the Major's protests, got some labourers to come up and clear away the guns from the lawn. That was the last straw! The poor old Admiral went out the morning after he came home, and found them half buried in an old rubbish ditch. It broke his heart, and he was found dead, clasping his arms round one of them. Now, what do you call that but murder?"