He was, indeed. He never pressed and the interest ran, without his ever saying a word about it … And then, at the end, when what with that, and some expenses or other …” he hesitated, as though his memory was working ill … “oh, yes, on the church, you know. Well, it wasn’t £20,000 … But your uncle was generous, boy, do believe it. He gave me the balance making it up to £20,000. That is what we have had over and above some of the rentals since we have been here … There will be £300 or £400 for you to take in the bank when …” He would not say the words.

“It was £20,000 altogether?” said John.

“Yes,” said his father. “But, you know, when your aunt came she had all the papers in order, and there’s no denying she had a right to a lot more than that.”

The son was silent: he was growing older with every moment of this.

“She was just, too, John, believe me. They kept the place very well. It looked twice what it had been, though a little strange … when I went back there … Anyhow, it’s hers now.”

“Hers?” said John. “Oh, don’t bother, Papa. Don’t trouble. I ought not to have asked you.”

“Yes, dear boy; it had to be. Strictly, she could have made me sell. But in her odd way she’s generous too, I think. Though I can’t pretend that I ever … “He would not complete the sentence. But from that moment the boy had an unpleasing image of the woman in his heart.

“It was her right, John, and she’ll do the right thing by you. She has no children, and it’s bound to come to you. And, you know, you are to go to Oriel? She’ll see to that. I make no doubt she’ll see to that. Settle it with her. And your allowance, my dear boy … and …”

He ceased, under a sudden spasm of extreme fatigue.

“I must stop now, boy.”

His son kissed him upon the forehead, and thought it oddly cold.

“It’s late,” the father added, almost in a whisper. “Tell Marie to come up. I’ll get to bed.”

And next morning young John Maple, waking late, alarmed that his father had not rung, went to his door, and knocked, and heard no answer. That father was dead.

*      *      *      *      *

The English friends in the place told the lonely boy what he should do, but he was already almost competent to act. Cut off though he had been from the life of his kind, he had a singularly mature power of decision, and it was nerved now by a strange, tenacious feeling in which, as in a composite picture, were inextricably entwined the beloved memory of the face which he would never see again for ever (every detail of the funeral remained vivid all his life)—a profound sense of wrong done him, and a vague, quite formless, but astonishingly strong intention of action—what action he knew not, nor how it should be performed, nor where. Even in one so young, sudden and overwhelming grief adds to the vividness of life intolerably. By so much as he dwelt—more than in real experience itself—upon his father’s voice, gesture, everything—by so much was he acutely, violently sensitive to harsh alien things.

His aunt had not come out for the funeral. She seemed to show an intolerable indifference. Bad as the immediate post-war conditions were, it was inexcusable. The letter he had received from her struck him like ice; though that woman had never written unkindly in her life, yet also she had never written kindly. The journey home in those strange, interrupted days of the spring of ’19, with the delays and the broken glass in the carriages and the sleepless nights, felt like an approach to some doom.