meditative way, which might have made other men curious.
She was seeing whether it would hold. He asked her once why she had
taken the Basts right into the heart of Evie's wedding. She stopped like
a frightened animal and said, "Does that seem to you so odd?" Her eyes,
the hand laid on the mouth, quite haunted him, until they were absorbed
into the figure of St. Mary the Virgin, before whom he paused for a
moment on the walk home.

It is convenient to follow him in the discharge of his duties. Margaret
summoned him the next day. She was terrified at Helen's flight, and he
had to say that she had called in at Oxford. Then she said: "Did she
seem worried at any rumour about Henry?" He answered, "Yes." "I knew it
was that!" she exclaimed. "I'll write to her." Tibby was relieved.

He then sent the cheque to the address that Helen gave him, and stated
that he was instructed to forward later on five thousand pounds. An
answer came back very civil and quiet in tone--such an answer as Tibby
himself would have given. The cheque was returned, the legacy refused,
the writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this to Helen,
adding in the fulness of his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a
monumental person after all. Helen's reply was frantic. He was to
take no notice. He was to go down at once and say that she commanded
acceptance. He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited him.
The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had
wandered no one knew whither. Helen had begun bungling with her money by
this time, and had even sold out her shares in the Nottingham and Derby
Railway. For some weeks she did nothing. Then she reinvested, and, owing
to the good advice of her stockbrokers, became rather richer than she
had been before.

CHAPTER XXXI

Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the
generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an
after-life in the city of ghosts, while from others--and thus was the
death of Wickham Place--the spirit slips before the body perishes. It
had decayed in the spring, disintegrating the girls more than they knew,
and causing either to accost unfamiliar regions. By September it was a
corpse, void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty
years of happiness. Through its round-topped doorway passed furniture,
and pictures, and books, until the last room was gutted and the last van
had rumbled away.