Love and hatred

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

The circumstances of Mr. Pavely's death had been so strange that the local paper had printed a verbatim report of the inquest, as well as a very flowery account of the departed, who had been, it was explained, so true and so loyal a townsman of Pewsbury. Yet, even so, there were those present at his funeral who muttered that Mr. Pavely had met his death just as might have been expected, through his love of money. It was also whispered that the job in which this queer foreigner had been associated with the banker had not been of the most reputable kind. This Fernando Apra—every one knew his queer name because of the big reward—had wanted to raise money for a kind of glorified gambling hell; that was the long and the short of it, after all, so much the shrewder folk of Pewsbury had already found out, reading between the lines of the evidence offered at the inquest.

In an official sense the chief mourners were two distant cousins of Godfrey Pavely—men with whom he had quarrelled years ago—but in a real, intimate sense, the principal mourners were old Mr. Privet, Lord St. Amant, who, though he was so fond of travel, never neglected the duties entailed by his position in the county, and last but by no means least Mr. Oliver Tropenell, who, as every one present was well aware, had during the last few months become the one intimate friend of the dead man. Among the women there were several who knew that at this very moment Mrs. Pavely was being comforted by Mr. Oliver Tropenell's mother, a lady who stood high in public esteem, and with whom Mrs. Pavely as a girl, had spent much of her youth, and from whose house, picturesque Freshley Manor, she had been married to the man whom they were now engaged in burying.

Another person present who aroused even more interest among the good folk of Pewsbury than either Lord St. Amant or Oliver Tropenell, was Mrs. Winslow.

The older townspeople looked at Katty with a good deal of rather excited sympathy, for they remembered the gossip and talk there had been about pretty Katty Fenton and the dead man, and of how unkind old Mrs. Pavely, now dead many a year, had shown herself to the lovely, motherless girl.

There were even some there who whispered that poor Godfrey Pavely had again become very fond of his first love—and that, too, when they were both old enough to know better! But these busybodies were not encouraged to say the little they knew. These are things—natural human failings—which should be forgotten at a man's funeral.

Mrs. Winslow did not look unreasonably upset. There were no tears in her bright brown eyes, and her black frock, sable plumed hat, and beautiful black furs, intensified the brilliant pink and white of her complexion. Indeed, many of the people who gazed at Katty that day thought they had never seen her looking so attractive. The world belongs to the living—not to the dead, and poor Godfrey Pavely, with his big, prosperous one-man business, and his almost uncanny cleverness in the matter of making money, belonged henceforth very decidedly to the past. So it was that among the men and women who stared with eager curiosity and respectful interest at the group of mourners, several noticed that Mr. Oliver Tropenell seemed to pay special attention to Mrs. Winslow.

Once he crossed over, and stood close to her for a minute or two by the still open grave, and his dark handsome face showed far more trace of emotion than did hers.

After the funeral, Lord St. Amant dropped Mrs. Winslow at the gate of Rosedean, and, on parting with Katty, he patted her hand kindly, telling himself that she was certainly a very pretty woman. Lord St. Amant, like most connoisseurs in feminine beauty, preferred seeing a pretty woman in black.

"You must try and forget poor Godfrey Pavely," he said feelingly.

He was startled and moved by the intensity with which she answered him:—"I wish I could—but I can't. I feel all the time as if he was there, close to me, trying to tell me something! I believe that he was murdered, Lord St. Amant."