"Well, it isn't my fault, I tell you. I'm not the company," was his harsh reply.
"And my poor Bertha so ill. It's cruel—it's inhuman, I say!" she shouted in a shrill voice.
Boyne only smiled grimly. He was not the kindly man of other days.
"It probably is so," he replied, turning away from the door. "But it's our insurance business; and business is business, after all!
"Yes!" retorted the poor woman. "You people are robbing the poor—that's what it is! And after fifteen years! Why, I've paid your company more in that time than what they would have paid to bury my Bertha!"
At a small house in the Loftus Road he knocked three times, and a dwarfed, red-eyed girl at last opened the door.
"Poor mother's dead, Mr. Boyne! Didn't you see the blinds?" she asked.
"Dead!" he exclaimed, looking at the little window of the sitting-room. "Get your book."
"I'll go and get it," was the girl's reply. "Mother died late last night. The doctor says it's heart disease."
"All right. Give me the book," he said brutally. "I suppose we'll have to pay. You paid up last week, didn't you?"