“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Heat too much for you, old girl?”
“No,” she said, and was silent for a moment. Then: “telegram from ... I’m so sorry ... poor Horace is dead.”
He had an odd feeling of deliberately putting off his grief until a more fitting time. He discussed the thing with Minnie as if it concerned a stranger. Apoplexy. Not to be wondered at. The funeral was to be on Thursday.
“I don’t suppose Julie will be heart-broken,” said Minnie. “She’ll be very well off, won’t she, Lionel?”
He was aware that she longed to discuss his own prospects; how “well off” he was to be, but he refused to open the subject. It wasn’t decent. No doubt Horace had done the proper thing.
That evening, after the child was in bed and Minnie in the kitchen washing the dishes, he went out on the porch with his pipe and consecrated an hour to Horace. Recalled his unfailing kindness, his justice, his melancholy, saw, for an instant, and in a vague way, the tragedy of the man who is only a means of supplying others with money. Childless, friendless, the most exploited creature under the sun.
He knew what a loss he had suffered! And still had that wretched feeling that the real pain was coming later, that now only his brain knew it, not yet his heart.
He had a sudden vision of that tea with Horace and Frankie, something more vivid than a memory. It brought an awful, blinding realisation of his present solitude. His two friends gone, and he left alone with a stranger. Minnie was a stranger. He couldn’t talk to her about Horace.
“Poor old man!” he said, with a sigh for that kindly lost spirit.