She might have added, as another reason, that the events of the last three weeks had drawn them more closely together—so closely that it wanted but a word—if once their minds were free from the obsession of the mystery—to bind them so that they should never again drift asunder.
Leonard replied, with a wintry smile: “Without you to talk things over, Constance, I believe I should go mad.”
“And I feel so guilty—so guilty—when I think of what I said so lightly about scandals and poor relations with all this hanging over your head.”
“Nothing more, I should think”—he looked about the room, as if to make sure that no telegrams or letters were floating in the air—“can happen now—except to me. Everybody else is laid low. One cousin has brought me a bill for the maintenance of his grandmother for fifty years—says he will take eighteen thousand pounds down. One ought really to be proud of such a cousin.”
“The solicitor of the Commercial Road, I suppose. But, really, what does it matter?”
“Nothing. Only at the moment there is a piling up; and every straw helps to break the camel’s back. The man says he is going to be a bankrupt. My uncle Frederick—that large-souled, genial, thirsty, wealthy, prosperous representative of colonial enterprise—now turns out to be an impostor and a fraud——”
“Oh, Leonard!”
“An impostor and a fraud,” he repeated. “He has a small general store in an Australian township, and he has come over to represent this as a big business and to make a Company out of it. The other uncle—the learned and successful lawyer——”
“Don’t tell me, Leonard.”
“Another time, then: we ought certainly to have heard the worst. Let us go to the village and bury the Family Honour before the altar in the Church, and put up a brass in memory of what our ancestors created.”