Too late! Too late! For now, not the poorest, greediest pedlar that cheats in rags for rags at the area-gate would change places with me.
Oh, vanity, how you have swindled me!
No doubt they think my mind is stunned. I have seen other men of my class stricken as I am. I have watched them in this frightful wait for the shaft they knew death had aimed and would not long delay. I know now why their eyes were dull, why their ears seemed not to hear. I know what they were thinking about. For, hour after hour, I too——
(Here the manuscript ends)
POSTSCRIPT
On the second day after James Galloway’s death, his eldest and outcast son called at the Galloway palace and asked for his brother Walter. Presently Walter, in dress and manner an ideal chief mourner and chief beneficiary, came down to him in the library. The dead man lay in a magnificent casket in the adjoining ball-room, which was half full of funeral flowers. They were scenting the whole house with stifling, suffocating perfume, sweet yet sickening.
“You came to see—father?” said Walter.
“No,” replied James. “I do not wish to be reminded. I am trying to forgive him.” Then he looked into his brother’s eyes with the keen, frank glance that is one of his many charms. “I’ve come to see you, to ask you what you intend to do about the will.”
Walter’s eyes shifted. “I don’t understand you,” he answered.