to add
to Ida's troubles; then, when he found that his own misdeeds were
supposed to have preyed on his brother-in-law's mind and hastened his
death, he continued to keep silence, in a kind of savage contempt. He,
at least, knew what Joseph's feelings had been, and all his sympathy and
all his regrets were for the dead man, and not for the saint, who, after
the manner of her kind, had understood nothing and forgiven nothing.

Yet, none the less, he would gladly have made peace with the family,
just as May and Walter would have made peace with him, had Ida's
bitterness not rendered that so hard as to be almost impossible. She was
too good a woman to overlook his sin, or to allow anyone else to
overlook it. She believed in the punishment of the sinner, not in his
pardon, and she did not think that Jimmy had suffered enough; possibly
she believed that he had not suffered at all, for had he not in the end
received a thousand pounds which should, by rights, have gone to her own
children? So, though he had repudiated Lalage to pacify his people,
and--it must be admitted also--to satisfy his own conscience, his only
reward had been a ghastly sense of isolation, both from his own world,
where the Grierson tradition rules, and from that other world into which
he had strayed for a few short never-to-be-forgotten months.

Jimmy had turned a little grey during the last year, and the boyish
charm had gone out of his face. Alas! he had grown careless as regarded
his appearance, and he had ceased to trouble about a number of little
things on the observance of which Lalage had once insisted. He never
worried as to whether his boots were cleaned or no, and he only shaved
when he was going into the little town. After all, what did it matter?
He had no friends, and he wanted none; society, or at any rate women's
society, had ceased to be a factor in his life.

On the other hand, success had come to him professionally, though it
meant very little to him, or very little compared with what it would
have meant in the London days, when half the income he was making now
would have seemed wealth. Joseph's legacy had allowed him breathing
space. He had quitted Fleet Street finally, abandoned all thought of
journalism, and gone in for the writing of short stories. Some quality
in the latter, possibly the cynical outlook on life which coloured them
all, caught the fancy of editors accustomed to the milk-and-water
optimism of the average writer, a