“Here you are; read it for yourself,” said Wagram, pushing the paper across the table. “It’s a ghastly thing to figure out, though, if these are the sole survivors. Develin Hunt! That’s a rum name! How perfectly sick that fellow must have got all through boyhood, youth, and middle age of being—banteringly or the reverse—told he had the Develin him.”
They laughed at this—none more heartily than that finished old diplomat Grantley Wagram. Laughed—in his bright, genial, humorous way, and yet all the time he was thinking how Wagram was, figuratively speaking, cracking jokes over his own open grave. Laughed—even as he might have laughed a few minutes earlier, before this dreadful bolt out of the blue had fallen. Laughed—as Wagram, sitting there in his blissful ignorance, was laughing. Why, the thing was so sudden, so unlooked-for, and withal so disastrous, that it seemed like a dream. Yet Grantley Wagram could laugh. But within his mind still hummed in mocking refrain his first ejaculation: “There can’t be two Develin Hunts.”
They talked on of various matters—the prospects of grouse on the Twelfth, and when Wagram’s boy would be home for the holidays, and so forth. Then the priest said:
“By the way, Squire, that’s a most astonishing thing Wagram has been telling me about that Miss Calmour and the claim made against you.”
“Yes; I told Father Gayle because he seemed to have rather a—well, unexalted opinion of the poor girl when we first talked about her,” explained Wagram.
“Oh, come; I didn’t say so.”
“No. Still, I thought it only fair to show the other side of her.”
“No one could have been more astonished than I was myself,” said the Squire. “She certainly behaved most honourably.”
“I should think so,” declared Wagram. “Her people are chronically hard up, and, that being so, to tear up a cheque for a thousand pounds deliberately was in her case rather heroic.”
“Probably the rest of them will lead her a terrible life on the strength of it,” said the Squire. “Poor child! she seemed a good deal better than her belongings. We must see if we can’t do something for her.”