figure on the bed, and could not turn to it again. They might come
here and do all sorts of things to it, mysterious, evil-seeming things
with knives and drugs....

She must not think of that. She must learn exactly what Mrs. Harman
thought and desired. Her own apathy with regard to her husband had given
way completely now to a desire to anticipate and meet Mrs. Harman's
every conceivable wish.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

LOVE AND A SERIOUS LADY

Sec.1

The news of Sir Isaac's death came quite unexpectedly to Mr. Brumley. He
was at the Climax Club, and rather bored; he had had some tea and dry
toast in the magazine room, and had been through the weeklies, and it
was a particularly uninteresting week. Then he came down into the hall,
looked idly at the latest bulletins upon the board, and read that "Sir
Isaac Harman died suddenly this morning at Sta. Margherita, in Ligure,
whither he had gone for rest and change."

He went on mechanically reading down the bulletin, leaving something of
himself behind him that did not read on. Then he returned to that
remarkable item and re-read it, and picked up that lost element of his
being again.

He had awaited this event for so long, thought of it so often in such a
great variety of relationships, dreamt of it, hoped for it, prayed for
it, and tried not to think of it, that now it came to him in reality it
seemed to have no substance or significance whatever. He had exhausted
the fact before it happened. Since first he had thought of it there had
passed four long years, and in that time he had seen it from every
aspect, exhausted every possibility. It had become a theoretical
possibility, the basis of continually less confident, continually more
unsubstantial day dreams. Constantly he had tried not to think of it,
tried to assure himself of Sir Isaac's invalid immortality. And here it
was!

The line above it concerned an overdue ship, the line below resumed a
speech by Mr. Lloyd George. "He would challenge the honourable member to
repeat his accusations----"

Mr. Brumley stood quite still before the mauve-coloured print letters
for some time, then went slowly across the hall into the breakfast-room,
sat down in a chair by the fireplace, and fell into a kind of
featureless thinking. Sir Isaac was dead, his wife was free, and the
long waiting that had become a habit was at an end.

He had anticipated a wild elation, and for a while he was only sensible
of change, a pro