said. Then, with gentle
insistence, he led Mary away. They left the old man, propped up by the
high stool on which his feet rested, seated far back in the great chair,
hard by Captain Duggle's grave, where the scepter lay on a carpet of
gold. The tall candles burnt on either side of his throne, imparting a
far-off semblance of ceremonial state.

Thus died, unmarried, in the seventy-first year of his age, Aloysius
William Saffron, formerly of Exeter, Surveyor and Auctioneer. He had run,
on the whole, a creditable course; starting from small beginnings, and
belonging to a family more remarkable for eccentricity than for any solid
merit, he had built up a good practice; he had made money and put it by;
he enjoyed a good name for financial probity. But he was held to be a
vain, fussy, self-important, peacocky fellow; very self-centered also and
(as Beaumaroy had indicated) impatient of the family and social
obligations which most men recognize, even though often unwillingly. As
the years gathered upon his head, these characteristics were intensified.
On the occasion of some trifling set-back in business--a rival cut him
out in a certain negotiation--He threw up everything and disappeared from
his native town. Thenceforward nothing was heard of him there, save that
he wrote occasionally to his cousin, Sophia Radbolt, and her husband,
both of whom he most cordially hated, whose claims to his notice, regard,
or assistance he had, of late years at least, hotly resented. Yet he
wrote to them--wrote them vaunting and magniloquent letters, hinting
darkly of great doings and great riches. In spite of their opinion of
him, the Radbolts came to believe perhaps half of what he said; he was
old and without other ties; their thirst for his money was greedy.
Undoubtedly the Radbolts would dearly have loved to get hold of him
and--somehow--hold him fast.

When he came to Tower Cottage--it was in the first year of the war--he
was precariously sane; it was only gradually that his fundamental and
constitutional vices and foibles turned to a morbid growth. First came
intensified hatred and suspicion of the Radbolts--they were after him and
his money! Then, through hidden processes of mental distortion, there
grew the conviction that he was of high importance, a great man, the
object of great conspiracies, in which the odious Radbolts were but
instruments. It was, no doubt, the course of public events, culminating
in the Great War, which gave