“It’s often struck me,” he went on, surprised, “that perhaps you didn’t appreciate him at his true value whilst he was alive. Very likely you don’t know, as I know, the way he used to talk about you behind your back.”
“If it was anything like the way he talked in front of my face, I’d rather not hear.”
“Anyway, I daresay, ma’am, you often find yourself looking about for his successor?”
“To tell you the truth, I do.”
He tried to take her hand, but failed.
“I can see him now,” he remarked sentimentally. “We was walking together in Stratford Broadway, and suddenly he turned to me and he says, ‘Ernest,’ he says, ‘something seems to tell me I’m not long for this world. I want you to make me a promise,’ he says. ‘If anything amiss happens to me, I look to you to be a friend to the wife. And if so be,’ he says, with a sort of a kind of a break in his voice, ‘if so be as you should take a fancy to her, and she should take a fancy to you, nothing would give me more pleasure looking down on you both,’ he says, ‘than to—’”
“Bequeathed me to you, did he?”
“It amounts to that, ma’am.”
“All this is news to me,” she remarked. “About what date was it?”
“About what date?” echoed Hards, rubbing his chin. “I can give it you within a very little. It was the night before I met William Humphries, and him and me had a few friendly words about football, and I was in the horspital for three weeks. That was the early part of December. I think it was December you said that poor Crowther drew his last breath. Must have been only a few days—three at the utmost—that he had his talk with me.”