Kate Grantley and Kilbourne, arriving from opposite directions, reached his gate at the same moment, the next morning. Rudely chalked upon the stone post was the question which had confronted Kilbourne on his class-room walls.
He pointed to the words with his stick which shook in his hand; his face was ashen white.
"Isn't it fitting that you and I should be confronted by that question?" he asked her.
She stared from the writing to him.
"I don't think it at all fitting!" she said. "Why don't you send for a policeman, and stop it?"
He pushed open the gate, and, taking no further notice of her, walked up the little path to his door. Reaching it, he found her behind him.
With that air of girlish authority he had once found so pleasant, "I am coming in," she said.
He led the way into that bow-windowed room in which Mrs Kilbourne had died. The pervading aroma of alcohol had left it; airiness and a certain formal tidiness now reigned in place of stuffiness and neglect; but the room was perhaps more depressing than before to a sensitive mind.
The sofa was in the same place; the basket, which had held the things she liked to have at hand, still stood beside it. The over-large table at which the unfortunate Julia had so often watched her husband eat his unappetising meals, and where he still made a pretence of eating them in sight of the empty sofa, still occupied too much of the available space.
Kilbourne turned and confronted the girl, who had followed him in. His eyes shone now, and there was the working of excitement in his face.