These distresses begot a hope. Perhaps, after all, probably, there would be some settlement.... She might not be rich, not so very rich.... She might be tied up....
He perceived in that lay his hope of salvation. Otherwise—oh, pitiful soul!—things were possible in him; he saw only too clearly what dreadful things were possible.
If only she were disinherited, if only he might take her, stripped of all these possessions that even in such glancing anticipations begot——this horrid indigestion of the imagination!
But then,——the Hostels?...
There he stumbled against an invincible riddle!
There was something dreadful about the way in which these considerations blotted out the essential fact of separations abolished, barriers lowered, the way to an honourable love made plain and open....
The day of the funeral came at last, and Mr. Brumley tried not to think of it, paternally, at Margate. He fled from Sir Isaac’s ultimate withdrawal. Blenker’s obituary notice in the Old Country Gazette was a masterpiece of tactful eulogy, ostentatiously loyal, yet extremely not unmindful of the widowed proprietor, and of all the possible changes of ownership looming ahead. Mr. Brumley, reading it in the Londonward train, was greatly reminded of the Hostels. That was a riddle he didn’t begin to solve. Of course, it was imperative the Hostels should continue—imperative. Now they might run them together, openly, side by side. But then, with such temptations to hitherto inconceivable vulgarities. And again, insidiously, those visions returned of two figures, manifestly opulent, grouped about a big motor car or standing together under a large subservient archway....
There was a long letter from her at his flat, a long and amazing letter. It was so folded that his eye first caught the writing on the third page: “never marry again. It is so clear that our work needs all my time and all my means.” His eyebrows rose, his expression became consternation; his hands trembled a little as he turned the letter over to read it through. It was a deliberate letter. It began—
“Dear Mr. Brumley, I could never have imagined how much there is to do after we are dead, and before we can be buried.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Brumley; “but what does this mean?”