“All right, Mr Corson, I’ll shut up. You’ll see the time when you’ll be mighty glad to turn to me for help. Till then, work on your own; but you needn’t aim this way, it won’t get you anywhere.”
Meantime there was consternation among the nearest of kin to the dead man.
In the Prall apartment, Miss Letitia was conducting conversation ably aided and abetted by Eliza Gurney, while young Bates sat listening and joining in when there was opportunity.
“Worst of all is the disgrace,” Miss Prall was saying. “There’s no use my pretending I’m over-come with grief,—personal grief, I mean, for I never cared two straws for the man, and I’m not going to make believe I did. But the publicity and newspaper talk is terrible. Once it blows over and is forgotten we’ll be able to hold up our heads again, but just now, we’re in the public eye,—and it’s an awful place to be!”
“But who did it, Aunt Letitia,” said Bates. “We’ve got to get the murderer——”
“I don’t mind so much about that,” his aunt returned, with a sharp sniff. “All I want is to get the thing hushed up. Of course, you’re the heir now, Ricky, so you must put on suitable mourning and all that, but those things can be attended to in due course.”
“Where you going to have the funeral and when?” asked Eliza. “I don’t think I’ll go.”
“You needn’t, if you don’t want to,” Miss Prall agreed. “I don’t blame you,—I don’t want to attend it myself, but I suppose I ought to. It will be in the undertaker’s chapel, and it will soon be over. Let’s have it just as quickly as possible, Rick. To-morrow, say.”
“Oh, Aunt Letitia! Do observe the rules of common decency! We can’t hurry the poor man into his grave like that. And I shouldn’t wonder if there’ll be a lot of red tape and inquiry before we can bury him at all.”
“Maybe the body’ll have to be sent back to England,” suggested Eliza, and Richard was just about to say he supposed it would, when the doorbell of the apartment rang.