Five.
Ten o’clock. The news was abroad in the house. Alicia had gone to spread it. Maggie had startled everybody by deciding to go down and tell Clara herself, though Albert was bound to call. The nurse had laid out the corpse. Auntie Hamps and Edwin were again in the drawing-room together; the ageing lady was making up her mind to go. Edwin, in search of an occupation, prepared to write letters to one or two distant relatives of his mother. Then he remembered his promise to Big James, and decided to write that letter first.
“What a mercy he passed away peacefully!” Auntie Hamps exclaimed, not for the first time.
Edwin, at a rickety fancy desk, began to write: “Dear James, my father passed peacefully away at—” Then, with an abrupt movement, he tore the sheet in two and threw it in the fire, and began again: “Dear James, my father died quietly at eight o’clock to-night.”
Soon afterwards, when Mrs Hamps had departed with her genuine but too spectacular grief, Edwin heard an immense commotion coming down the road from Hanbridge: cheers, shouts, squeals, penny whistles, and trumpets. He opened the gate.
“Who’s in?” he asked a stout, shabby man, who was gesticulating in glee with a little Tory flag on the edge of the crowd.
“Who do you think, mister?” replied the man drunkenly.
“What majority?”
“Four hundred and thirty-nine.”