off," then--and,
miraculously purged of faults, with all their defects somehow remedied,
the colonel's wife and brother, with Agatha and the colonel's other
interred relatives, were partaking of dignified joys in bright supernal
iridescent realms, which the colonel resignedly looked forward to
entering, on some comfortably remote day or another, and thus rejoining
his transfigured kindred.... Such was the colonel's charitable decision,
in the forming whereof logic was in no way implicated. For religion, as
the colonel would have told you sedately, was not a thing to be reasoned
about. Attempting to do that, you became in Rudolph Musgrave's honest
eyes regrettably flippant.

Meanwhile Cousin Lucy Fentnor was taking care of the colonel and little
Roger. And Lichfield, long before the lettering on Patricia's tombstone
had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy
Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave,
upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here
nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished
second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep
house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial
arrangement, without provoking scandal's tongue to more than a jocose
innuendo or two when people met for "auction"--that new-fangled
perplexing variant of bridge, just introduced, wherein you bid on the
suits.... And, besides, Cousin Lucy Fentnor (as befitted any one born an
Allardyce) was to all accounts a notable housekeeper, famed alike for
the perilous glassiness of her hardwood floors, her dexterous management
of servants, her Honiton-braid fancy-work (familiar to every patron of
Lichfield charity bazaars), and her unparalleled calves-foot jelly.
Under Cousin Lucy Fentnor's systematized coddling little Roger grew like
the proverbial ill weed, and the colonel likewise waxed perceptibly in
girth.

Thus it was that accident and a woman's intervention seemed once more to
combine in shielding Rudolph Musgrave from discomfort. And in
consequence it was considered improbable that at this late day the
colonel would do the proper thing by Clarice Pendomer, as, at the first
tidings of Patricia's death, had been authentically rumored among the
imaginative; and, in fact, Lichfield no longer considered that
necessary. The claim of outraged morality against these two had been
thrown out of court, through some