Directly after the funeral, Joseph packed, with his own hands, all Agnes's valuables, including their very handsome china and silver, and sent them to Mr. Caswell's address in C—. He then leased his house, sold all his furniture at auction, and went to board at a hotel.
John and Letty, having finished their arrangements, returned to C—, taking with them Madge and Mary, who was delighted with the idea of living with Mrs. Caswell and taking care of her poor darling, as she always called Madge.
John had laboured in vain to penetrate the reserve in which Joseph had wrapped himself, so as to find out what he intended to do, and whether he had any thought of abandoning his present business; but Joseph, though always friendly enough, absolutely declined any such conversation: so that his relatives were left entirely in the dark as to his future prospects.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
A LAST GLIMPSE.
WE need not follow the Caswells far into their subsequent life. A visitor might have found them, not many years afterwards, sitting on their broad veranda, looking down over the pretty suburbs of the city to the great river on which it lay.
Madge, still helpless as far as walking is concerned, but with a look of health in her face which shows how much she has improved, occupies the wheeled-chair, where she sits nearly all day, and in which she goes all over the garden and the ground-floor of the house.
Una and Jack, now a great boy and girl, lean upon the arms of her chair, listening to an interminable account of a certain Prince Arthur, whose adventures have occupied them for many evenings, and whose journeyings extended all over the world. A second little girl, rather more than a year old, is carried off to bed by Mary, who pauses a few minutes to hear the end of a terrific combat with lions and elephants in which the prince is at present engaged.
Letty sits at a little distance, listening, while John reads the papers, and she is knitting,—not, as of old, on an afghan or a shawl, but on a substantial blue sock; for it is the first year of the war, and all hands are busily engaged in furnishing clothes and provisions for the soldiers.
John's hair begins to be a little gray, and he reads his paper with the help of glasses. His business has prospered beyond all expectation; and his purchases of land have turned out so well that he is, beyond all dispute, a rich man. People wonder that he does not pull down that great square pile and erect a handsome Gothic or Italian house in its stead; but John only smiles, and says his wife has old-fashioned notions about houses, and, besides, it is well-known that no builder could ever make a decent house for himself. So the old house remains unaltered, save by the insertion of some modern conveniences in the shape of bathing and heating apparatus.