"Dated, you see, the day after the report of your death was published here."
"But why?" demanded Whitaker, dumfounded. "Why?"
"I infer she felt herself somehow honour-bound by the monetary obligation," said the lawyer. "In her understanding your marriage of convenience was nothing more—a one-sided bargain, I think you said she called it. She couldn't consider herself wholly free, even though you were dead, until she had repaid this loan which you, a stranger, had practically forced upon her—if not to you, to your estate."
"But death cancels everything—"
"Not," Drummond reminded him with a slow smile, "the obligation of a period of decent mourning that devolves upon a widow. Mrs. Whitaker may have desired to marry again immediately. If I'm any judge of human nature, she argued that repayment of the loan wiped out every obligation. Feminine logic, perhaps, but—"
"Good Lord!" Whitaker breathed, appalled in the face of this contingency which had seemed so remote and immaterial when he was merely Hugh Morten, bachelor-nomad, to all who knew him on the far side of the world.
Drummond dropped his head upon his hand and regarded his friend with inquisitive eyes.
"Looks as though you may have gummed things up neatly—doesn't it?"
Whitaker nodded in sombre abstraction.
"You may not," continued Drummond with light malice, "have been so generous, so considerate and chivalric, after all."