mell of corpses was not far distant from the couch whereon they
reclined. She wanted youth. Rightly or wrongly she thought she was
entitled to the best, and who will deny that youth is the best? She was
devotedly attached to young men. She would have required a good deal of
persuasion to believe that a man of thirty was too young for her; and if
she had deprived herself of this one luxury, it was, as we have seen,
simply out of regard for her daughters. She entertained no rooted
objection to disparity in ages as a matter of principle.

In the circumstances, Sir Joseph's senile raptures were simply tiresome,
and had he not been enormously rich she would have thought them a little
presumptuous. But there were many ways in which Sir Joseph Bullion's
friendship proved useful to her. He was not only a wealthy man, he was
also highly influential, and again and again she had used him and his
power for her own private purposes.

She proposed to use him again on this occasion.

"As a matter of fact," she said, correcting herself for the fourth time,
"I am not so much indisposed as angry."

"Not with me, I hope?" exclaimed the baronet.

As he proceeded to chuckle asthmatically over the fantastic
improbability of this suggestion, the elderly matron with marked
irritation called him sharply to order. "Have you read the papers?" she
demanded.

"'Ave I read the papers?" he repeated. "Of course I've read the papers."

Occasionally, very occasionally, particularly after periods of much
autogenous mirth, Sir Joseph Bullion dropped an H. But he never noticed
it. It was a sort of unconscious reverberation of former days; as if his
lowly past, especially that portion of it which had been spent with the
first and ungrammatical Mrs. Bullion, insisted on revealing itself to
the world, to be acknowledged and congratulated on what it had achieved.

"Well then," pursued the widow firmly, "you know about Lord Henry!"

"Lord Henry?" he cried. "What about Lord Henry?"

Mrs. Delarayne began to examine her rings very studiously, as if she
wished to make quite certain that none of the stones had gone astray in
the last five minutes. "It's all very well, Joseph," she observed
quietly; "but if Lord Henry goes--I go. Now understand that once and for
all. I can't endure London without him."

"Not really?" he ejaculated, leaning forward. "Are you serious? D'you
mean Lord Henry, the biologist or something?"

Mrs. Delarayne continued the close s