Nathaniel Kingsnorth's twenty years of loneliness and desolation were coming to an end. What an empty, arid stretch of time those years seemed to him as he feebly looked back on them!
After the tragedy of his sister's reckless marriage he deserted public life entirely and shut himself away in his country-house—except for a few weeks in London occasionally when his presence was required on one or other of the Boards of which he was a director.
The Irish estate—which brought about all his misfortunes—he disposed of at a ridiculously low figure. He said he would accept any bid, however small, so that he could sever all connection with the hated village.
From the day of Angela's elopement he neither saw nor wrote to any member of his family.
His other sister, Mrs. Chichester, wrote to him from time to time—telling him one time of the birth of a boy: two years later of the advent of a girl.
Kingsnorth did not answer any of her letters.
In no way dismayed, Mrs. Chichester continued to write periodically. She wrote him when her son Alaric went to school and also when he went to college. Alaric seemed to absorb most of her interest. He was evidently her favourite child. She wrote more seldom of her daughter Ethel, and when she did happen to refer to her she dwelt principally on her beauty and her accomplishments. Five years before, an envelope in deep mourning came to Kingsnorth, and on opening it he found a letter from his sister acquainting him with the melancholy news that Mr. Chichester had ended a life of usefulness at the English bar and had died, leaving the family quite comfortably off.
Kingsnorth telegraphed his condolences and left instructions for a suitable wreath to be sent to the funeral. But he did not attend it. Nor did he at any time express the slightest wish to see his sister nor did he encourage any suggestion on her part to visit him.
When he was stricken with an illness, from which no hope of recovery was held out to him, he at once began to put his affairs in order, and his lawyer spent days with him drawing up statements of his last wishes for the disposition of his fortune.
With death stretching out its hand to snatch him from a life he had enjoyed so little, his thoughts, coloured with the fancies of a tired, sick brain, kept turning constantly, to his dead sister Angela.