, affectionate
and well-meaning, but thoroughly unbusiness-like young men, were not
to worry. Her evident conviction was that he _had_ foreseen, he
_had_ provided for them.

"Lord only knows," I said to Burton, "what the dear soul imagines
will turn up."

Then one day she sent for me; for me, mind you, not Burton. There
was something that she and her daughter, desired to consult me
about. I went off at once to the dreadful little lodgings in the
Fulham Road where they had taken refuge. I found Antigone looking,
if anything, more golden and more splendid, more divinely remote and
irrelevant against the dingy background. Her mother was sitting very
upright at the head and she at the side of the table that almost
filled the room. They called me to the chair set for me facing
Antigone. Throughout the interview I was exposed, miserably, to the
clear candor of her gaze.

Her mother, with the simplicity which was her charming quality, came
straight to the point. It seemed that Wrackham had thought better of
us, of Burton and me, than he had ever let us know. He had named us
his literary executors. Of course, his widow expounded, with the
option of refusal. Her smile took for granted that we would not
refuse.

What did I say? Well, I said that I couldn't speak for Burton, but
for my own part I--I said I was honored (for Antigone was looking at
me with those eyes) and of course I shouldn't think of refusing, and
I didn't imagine Burton would either. You see I'd no idea what it
meant. I supposed we were only in for the last piteous turning out
of the dead man's drawers, the sorting and sifting of the rubbish
heap. We were to decide what was worthy of him and what was not.

There couldn't, I supposed, be much of it. He had been hard pressed.
He had always published up to the extreme limit of his production.

I had forgotten all about the "Life and Letters." They had been only
a fantastic possibility, a thing our profane imagination played
with; and under the serious, chastening influences of his death it
had ceased to play.

And now they were telling me that this thing was a fact. The letters
were, at any rate. They had raked them all in, to the last postcard
(he hadn't written any to us), and there only remained the Life. It
wasn't a perfectly accomplished fact; it would need editing, filling
out, and completing from where he had left it off. He had not named
his editor, his biographer, in writing--at least, they could