ested, olive shade, with purple
smudges beneath the up-rolled eyes, and lips like dried leaves. His end,
it was apparent, had been as sudden as it was natural.

Old Pompey ... dead! Gordon straightened up. Simultaneously two ideas
flashed into his mind--Lettice and Hollidew's gold. Then they grew
coherent, explicable. Lettice and the gold were one; she was the gold, the
gold was Lettice. He recalled now, appositely, what Bartamon had told him
but a few days before ... Hollidew would consent to make no will; there
were no other children. The money would automatically go, principally, to
Lettice, without question or contest. If he had but considered before,
acted with ordinary sense ... the girl had been in love with him; he
might have had it all. He gazed cautiously, but with no determined plan of
action, out over the street--it lay deserted in the ambient sunlight.

He quickly left the house, the old man sprawling grotesquely across the
bare hall, forcing himself to walk with an assumed, deliberate ease over
the plank walk, past Simmons' corner. As he progressed a plan formulated
in his mind, a plan obvious, promising immediate, practicable
results ... Lettice had told him that she would remain for two weeks at
the farm. It was evident that she was still there. His gait quickened; if
he could reach her now, before any one else.... He wished that he had
closed the door upon the old man's body; any one passing as he had passed
could see the corpse; a wagon would be sent for the girl.

He commenced, outside the village, to run, pounding over the dusty way
with long-drawn, painful gasps, his chest oppressed by the now
unaccustomed exercise, the rapid motion. When he came in sight of the
farmhouse that was his objective, he stopped and endeavored to remove all
traces of his haste; he rubbed off his shoes, fingered his necktie, mopped
his brow.

There was a woman on the porch; it proved to be Mrs. Caley, folded in a
shawl, pale and gaunt. Suddenly the possibility occurred to him that
Lettice had driven into church. But she was in the garden patch beyond,
Mrs. Caley said. Gordon strolled around the corner of the house as
hastily, as slowly, as he dared.

He saw her immediately. She wore a blue linen skirt, a white waist, and
her sleeves were rolled up. The sun glinted on her uncovered hair, blazed
in the bright tin basin into which she was dropping scarlet peppers. She
appeared younger than he had remembered her; her arms