ffered the last degree
of humiliation and almost of want, or just as his wife and children
couldn't not have died of the little he was able, under dire reiterated
pinches, to do for them; but it was "rum," for final solitary brooding,
that he hadn't appeared to see his way definitely to undertake the
support of a family till the last scrap of his little low-browed,
high-toned business, and the last figment of "property" in the old tiled
and timbered shell that housed it, had been sacrificed to creditors
mustering six rows deep.

Of course what had counted too in the odd order was that even at the
end of the two or three years he had "allowed" her, Kate Cookham, gorged
with his unholy tribute, had become the subject of no successful siege
on the part either of Bill Frankle or, by what he could make out, of any
one else. She had judged decent--he could do her that justice--to take
herself personally out of his world, as he called it, for good and all,
as soon as he had begun regularly to bleed; and, to whatever lucrative
practice she might be devoting her great talents in London or elsewhere,
he felt his conscious curiosity about her as cold, with time, as the
passion of vain protest that she had originally left him to. He could
recall but two direct echoes of her in all the bitter years--both
communicated by Bill Frankle, disappointed and exposed and at last
quite remarkably ingenuous sneak, who had also, from far back, taken to
roaming the world, but who, during a period, used fitfully and
ruefully to reappear. Herbert Dodd had quickly seen, at their first
meeting--every one met every one sooner or later at Properley, if
meeting it could always be called, either in the glare or the gloom of
the explodedly attractive Embankment--that no silver stream of which he
himself had been the remoter source could have played over the career of
this all but repudiated acquaintance. That hadn't fitted with his first,
his quite primitive raw vision of the probabilities, and he had further
been puzzled when, much later on, it had come to him in a roundabout way
that Miss Cookham was supposed to be, or to have been, among them for
a few days "on the quiet," and that Frankle, who had seen her and who
claimed to know more about it than he said, was cited as authority for
the fact. But he hadn't himself at this juncture seen Frankle; he had
only wondered, and a degree of mystification had even remained.

That memory referred itself to th