"Peter, I am surprised at you!" broke in his horrified mother.
Thus had the path of Peter been made smooth and his way plain by Ferlie's brilliant marriage.
"I staked little enough on her," said Mr. Carmichael, relishing the jest of Martha and Mary's antiquated establishment. "Your mother was mistrustful of education for her own sex; she did quite well for herself without it, didn't she? Ferlie seems to have justified the conviction that the old-fashioned girl gets the matrimonial plums. At any rate, you will owe your sister a good deal. See that she stays happy."
Of his son-in-law, whom he only saw once, he said very little.
"Impossible to judge them by the young men of my day. This type did well enough in the War crisis."
He did not leave his wife badly off. With Peter on the way to being floated, and Ferlie secure, she had her widow's pension to herself, besides a little private means and the sum the big town-house eventually fetched when Ferlie bought it, pandering to a dream of her mother's that Peter might one day practise there and retain the Carmichael traditions in the old setting. Till that satisfactory day it could nearly always be sub-let.
Somewhat doubtful of the Christian aspect of her husband's expressed desire for cremation Mrs. Carmichael, while respecting his wishes, determined that the rest of the funeral obsequies should be sufficiently orthodox to disarm his Creator.
"No proper tombstone, you see," she complained damply to Ferlie. "The design should, so obviously, have been a severe cross, quite plain, with perhaps a weeping angel praying. Then a dove of peace hovering, and maybe a few lilies. The simpler the better, you know. And a scroll at the foot, or an open book with one of those grand old texts—Isaiah, is it, or Ecclesiasticus?—anyway, one of the Prophets—'Fear not for I have redeemed thee.' So comforting. Or else the one about panting for living waters that always makes me feel thirsty myself. Your dear father was so fond of rhetoric."
Ferlie, not quite sure whether the weeping angel was destined to wear a delicate semblance to the bereaved wife, nor convinced that the cross could be considered suitably symbolic of the faith of one who had ever regarded it as the undeserved gibbet, brought upon him by himself, of a well-meaning Eastern agitator nearly two thousand years ago, was inclined to demur.
"Father never evinced either the slightest fear of his condemnation hereafter, nor any faith in an ultimate redemption," she protested, "and I think it would have been rather hypocritical to parade a thirst for living waters after death in anyone who can hardly be described as having gasped for them during life."