"Who is it?"
"The hospitals. When an old lady finds in her latter days that she hates everybody, and fancies that the people around her are all thinking of her money, she's uncommon likely to indulge herself in a little bit of revenge, and solace herself with large-handed charity."
"But she's so good a woman at heart," said Hugh.
"And what can a good woman do better than promote hospitals?"
"She'll never do that. She's too strong. It's a maudlin sort of thing, after all, for a person to leave everything to a hospital."
"But people are maudlin when they're dying," said Brooke,—"or even when they think they're dying. How else did the Church get the estates, of which we are now distributing so bountifully some of the last remnants down at our office? Come into the next room, and we'll have a smoke."
They had their smoke, and then they went at half-price to the play; and, after the play was over, they eat three or four dozen of oysters between them. Brooke Burgess was a little too old for oysters at midnight in September; but he went through his work like a man. Hugh Stanbury's powers were so great, that he could have got up and done the same thing again, after he had been an hour in bed, without any serious inconvenience.
But, in truth, Brooke Burgess had still another word or two to say before he went to his rest. They supped somewhere near the Haymarket, and then he offered to walk home with Stanbury, to his chambers in Lincoln's Inn. "Do you know that Mr. Gibson at Exeter?" he asked, as they passed through Leicester Square.
"Yes; I knew him. He was a sort of tame-cat parson at my aunt's house, in my days."
"Exactly;—but I fancy that has come to an end now. Have you heard anything about him lately?"