our window, and stared at me as I went to and
fro; and then we had a raid from a little English clergyman and his
amiable, capable wife in severely Anglican blacks, who swooped down
upon us like virtuous but resolute vultures from the adjacent village of
Saint Jean de Pollack.

The clergyman was one of those odd types that oscillate between remote
country towns in England and the conduct of English Church services
on mutual terms in enterprising hotels abroad, a tremulous, obstinate
little being with sporadic hairs upon his face, spectacles, a red button
nose, and aged black raiment. He was evidently enormously impressed by
my uncle's monetary greatness, and by his own inkling of our identity,
and he shone and brimmed over with tact and fussy helpfulness. He
was eager to share the watching of the bedside with me, he proffered
services with both hands, and as I was now getting into touch with
affairs in London again, and trying to disentangle the gigantic details
of the smash from the papers I had succeeded in getting from Biarritz,
I accepted his offers pretty generously, and began the studies in modern
finance that lay before me. I had got so out of touch with the old
traditions of religion that I overlooked the manifest possibility of
his attacking my poor, sinking vestiges of an uncle with theological
solicitudes. My attention was called to that, however, very speedily by
a polite but urgent quarrel between himself and the Basque landlady as
to the necessity of her hanging a cheap crucifix in the shadow over the
bed, where it might catch my uncle's eye, where, indeed, I found it had
caught his eye.

"Good Lord!" I cried; "is THAT still going on!"

That night the little clergyman watched, and in the small hours he
raised a false alarm that my uncle was dying, and made an extraordinary
fuss. He raised the house. I shall never forget that scene, I think,
which began with a tapping at my bedroom door just after I had fallen
asleep, and his voice--

"If you want to see your uncle before he goes, you must come now."

The stuffy little room was crowded when I reached it, and lit by three
flickering candles. I felt I was back in the eighteenth century. There
lay my poor uncle amidst indescribably tumbled bedclothes, weary of life
beyond measure, weary and rambling, and the little clergyman trying to
hold his hand and his attention, and repeating over and over again:

"Mr. Ponderevo, Mr. Ponderevo, it is all right. It i