"Of course, he would have made some complicated settlement. I might have
known."

"_It is the strangest thing in the world to be a widow, much stranger
than anyone could ever have supposed, to have no one to control one, no
one to think of as coming before one, no one to answer to, to be free to
plan one's life for oneself_----"

* * * * *

He stood with the letter in his hand after he had read it through,
perplexed.

"I can't stand this," he said. "I want to know."

He went to his desk and wrote:--

"_My Dear, I want you to marry me._"

What more was to be said? He hesitated with this brief challenge in his
hand, was minded to telegraph it and thought of James's novel, _In the
Cage_. Telegraph operators are only human after all. He determined upon
a special messenger and rang up his quarter valet--he shared service in
his flat--to despatch it.

The messenger boy got back from Putney that evening about half-past
eight. He brought a reply in pencil.

"_My dear Friend_," she wrote. "_You have been so good to me, so
helpful. But I do not think that is possible. Forgive me. I want so
badly to think and here I cannot think. I have never been able to think
here. I am going down to Black Strand, and in a day or so I will write
and we will talk. Be patient with me._"

She signed her name "_Ellen_"; always before she had been "E.H."

"Yes," cried Mr. Brumley, "but I want to know!"

He fretted for an hour and went to the telephone.

Something was wrong with the telephone, it buzzed and went faint, and it
would seem that at her end she was embarrassed. "I want to come to you
now," he said. "Impossible," was the clearest word in her reply. Should
he go in a state of virile resolution, force her hesitation as a man
should? She might be involved there with Mrs. Harman, with all sorts of
relatives and strange people....

In the end he did not go.

Sec.3

He sat at his lunch alone next day at one of the little tables men
choose when they shun company. But to the right of him was the table of
the politicians, Adolphus Blenker and Pope of the East Purblow
Experiment, and Sir Piper Nicolls, and Munk, the editor of the _Daily
Rectification_, sage men all and deep in those mysterious manipulations
and wire-pullings by which the liberal party organization was even then
preparing for itself unusual distrust and dislike, and Horatio Blenker
was tenoring away after his manner about a case o