“Ah, that I can’t tell you. He was always thinking he had squared the circle, or found the missing bit to fit into the puzzle; but he kept his schemes very dark. He left boxes full of papers behind him when he died, and Miss Joliffe handed them to me to look over, instead of burning them. I shall go through them some day; but no doubt the whole thing is moonshine, and if he ever had a clue it died with him.”
There was a little pause; the chimes of Saint Sepulchre’s played “Mount Ephraim,” and the great bell tolled out midnight over Cullerne Flat.
“It’s time to be turning in. You haven’t a drop of whisky, I suppose?” he said, with a glance at the kettle which stood on a trivet in front of the fire; “I have talked myself thirsty.”
There was a pathos in his appeal that would have melted many a stony heart, but Westray’s principles were unassailable, and he remained obdurate.
“No, I am afraid I have not,” he said; “you see, I never take spirits myself. Will you not join me in a cup of cocoa? The kettle boils.”
Mr Sharnall’s face fell.
“You ought to have been an old woman,” he said; “only old women drink cocoa. Well, I don’t mind if I do; any port in a storm.”
The organist went to bed that night in a state of exemplary sobriety, for when he got down to his own room he could find no spirit in the cupboard, and remembered that he had finished the last bottle of old Martelet’s eau-de-vie at his tea, and that he had no money to buy another.