'It's useless, Mr. Baines.'
'I'll break the door down. I'm a strong man, and a determined. Ye are carrying things too far.'
In another moment the two men heard the creak of the bolts. Mary stood before them, vaguely discernible, but a forbidding figure.
'If you must—come upstairs,' she said coldly.
'Stay here in the passage, Arthur,' said Mr. Baines; 'I'll call ye when I want ye;' and he followed Mary up the stairs.
Edward Beechinor lay on his back, and his sunken eyes stared glassily at the ceiling. The skin of his emaciated face, stretched tightly over the protruding bones, had lost all its crimson, and was green, white, yellow. The mouth was wide open. His drawn features wore a terribly sardonic look—a purely physical effect of the disease; but it seemed to the two spectators that this mean and disappointed slave of a miserly habit had by one superb imaginative effort realized the full vanity of all human wishes and pretensions.
'Ye can go; I shan't want ye,' said Mr. Baines, returning to the clerk.
The lawyer never spoke of that night's business. Why should he? To what end? Mark Beechinor, under the old will, inherited the seven hundred pounds and the house. Miss Mellor of Hanbridge is still Miss Mellor, her hand not having been formally sought. But Mark, secretary of the Labour Church, is married. Miss Mellor, with a quite pardonable air of tolerant superiority, refers to his wife as 'a strange, timid little creature—she couldn't say Bo to a goose.'