Mr. Treverton filled and lit his pipe during his servant's absence. Before the tobacco was well alight, Shrowl returned, and reported a man visitor.
"Did you punch his head?" asked Mr. Treverton.
"No," said Shrowl. "I picked up his letter. He poked it under the gate and went away. Here it is."
The letter was written on foolscap paper, superscribed in a round legal hand. As Mr. Treverton opened it, two slips cut from newspapers dropped out. One fell on the table before which he was sitting; the other fluttered to the floor. This last slip Shrowl picked up and looked over its contents, without troubling himself to go through the ceremony of first asking leave.
After slowly drawing in and slowly puffing out again one mouthful of tobacco-smoke, Mr. Treverton began to read the letter. As his eye fell on the first lines, his lips began to work round the mouth-piece of the pipe in a manner that was very unusual with him. The letter was not long enough to require him to turn over the first leaf of it—it ended at the bottom of the opening sheet. He read it down to the signature—then looked up to the address, and went through it again from the beginning. His lips still continued to work round the mouth-piece of the pipe, but he smoked no more. When he had finished the second reading, he set the letter down very gently on the table, looked at his servant with an unaccustomed vacancy in the expression of his eyes, and took the pipe out of his mouth with a hand that trembled a little.
"Shrowl," he said, very quietly, "my brother, the Captain, is drowned."
"I know he is," answered Shrowl, without looking up from the newspaper-slip. "I'm reading about it here."
"The last words my brother said to me when we quarreled about the player-woman," continued Mr. Treverton, speaking as much to himself as to his servant, "were that I should die without one kind feeling in my heart toward any living creature."
"So you will," muttered Shrowl, turning the slip over to see if there was any thing worth reading at the back of it.
"I wonder what he thought about me when he was dying?" said Mr. Treverton, abstractedly, taking up the letter again from the table.