e took him firmly by the arm and turned him about. "Not here," he
said. "Come to the library. I will tell you, but I am no more fit to
talk just now than you are to listen."

His grandfather submitted, and Gwynne dropped his arm and rearranged the
quilt over his cousin's body. At the same moment Lord Strathland's eyes
lit on a sealed letter addressed to himself. Before Gwynne could
interfere he had broken the seal. It ran:

MY LORD,--I murdered Brathland. In cold blood--saving the fact
that I was drunk. My entire private fortune has gone for purposes
of blackmail. Even that might not have saved me eventually from the
hangman, we have grown so damned democratic. All things considered,
I am sure you will agree that it is quite proper I should make the
exit of a gentleman while there is yet time. Jack will give you
further particulars, should you care to listen to them. ZEAL."

He too had known nothing of the condition of his grandfather's heart,
and it had amused him to plan a last shock to the perennial optimism
and complacency of the person he disliked most on earth. The smile was
still on his frozen lips that expressed the amused anticipation of his
brain. Death, to do him justice, he had met with none of the cowardice
he had vaunted, and consistently with his arid cynical soul.

"Don't read it! Don't!" Gwynne had exclaimed, in agony, and forgetting
the awful figure on the bed in his alarm at the sight of his
grandfather's face. "If you must know the truth let me tell it in my own
way."

But Lord Strathland read, and fell at his feet like a bundle of old
clothes.

XVII

Gwynne wondered if he should ever shake off the pall-like memories of
the past week: the testimony before the coroner, in which every word had
to be weighed as carefully as if life instead of the honor of the
worthless dead were at stake, the reporters from the less dignified of
the British newspapers, and the American correspondents, two of whom
dodged the vigilance of the servants, entered the Abbey by a window, and
took snap shots of the lower rooms and of the coffins in the
death-chamber; the painful scenes with the women of the family, who had
descended in a body; the wearisome interview with the family solicitor,
in the course of which he had learned that he was heir to little more
than the entailed properties; which must be let in order to insure an
income for his three unmarried aunts, Zeal's fi