So we appraised him. Then on the top of it all the crash came, the
tremendous crash that left his child and widow almost penniless. He
hadn't provided for them at all. He had provided for nothing but his
own advertisement. He had been living, not only beyond his income,
but beyond, miles beyond, his capital, beyond even the perennial
power that was the source of it. And he had been afraid, poor
fellow! to retrench, to reduce by one cucumber-frame the items of
the huge advertisement; why, it would have been as good as putting
up the shop windows--his publishers would instantly have paid him
less.

His widow explained tearfully how it all was, and how wise and
foreseeing he had been; what a thoroughly sound man of business. And
really we thought the dear lady wouldn't be left so very badly off.
We calculated that Burton would marry Antigone, and that the simple,
self-denying woman could live in modest comfort on the mere proceeds
of the inevitable sale. Then we heard that the Tudor mansion, the
"Grounds," the very cucumber-frames, were sunk in a mortgage; and
the sale of his "effects," the motor-cars and furniture, the books
and the busts, paid his creditors in full, but it left a bare
pittance for his child and widow.

They had come up to town in that exalted state with which courageous
women face adversity. In her excitement Antigone tried hard to break
off her engagement to Grevill Burton. She was going to do
typewriting, she was going to be somebody's secretary, she was going
to do a thousand things; but she was not going to hang herself like
a horrid millstone round his neck and sink him. She had got it into
her head, poor girl, that Wrackham had killed himself, ruined
himself by his efforts to provide for his child and widow. They had
been the millstones round _his_ neck. She even talked openly now
about the "pot-boilers" they had compelled Papa to write; by which
she gave us to understand that he had been made for better things.
It would have broken your heart to hear her.

Her mother, ravaged and reddened by grief, met us day after day (we
were doing all we could for her) with her indestructible, luminous
smile. She could be tearful still on provocation, through the smile,
but there was something about her curiously casual and calm,
something that hinted almost complacently at a little mystery
somewhere, as if she had up her sleeve resources that we were not
allowing for. But we caught the gist of it, that we