“Why not?” still smiling. “All hands know I am dead. You must have heard them preaching my funeral sermon for a week.... Well, well,” with sudden impatience, “let’s make the ceremony as simple as possible. What is it you have come for? What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything. And I came—because—oh, I’ve been thinkin’ of you night and day ever since we all heard about it. And since yesterday, when Millard told he saw you at the depot, I—well, I have been thinkin’ of you more than ever, if that is possible. Of you, sittin’ here all alone in this great house.”
He shrugged. “Kindly omit flowers,” he said.
She sighed. “You make it hard for me, don’t you,” she said. “Well, I expected you would. May I sit down a minute?”
He hesitated. Then he took a hand from his pocket and motioned to the rocker at the other side of the table. “Sit down, if you want to,” he said.
She sat in the rocker. “I shan’t stay very long,” she began. “Foster, tell me: Is this very bad? They are sayin’—oh, they are sayin’ all sorts of things. I read the papers, of course. It seems like a terrible lot of money. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I have heard so much. Is it—will this—”
He finished the sentence for her and in his own way.
“Will it put me in the poorhouse, you mean?” he suggested. “I presume likely some of my charitable friends are picking out my room there already. Well, no, it won’t do that—quite. They are going to be disappointed. I shall have something left.”
“Of course you will. Any sane person would know that, of course.”
“Humph! Would they? I don’t know why. But I shall—a little. At least so my lawyers seem to think.”