gently, and at last he went to his little desk and wrote to
her his sixth letter--quite a beautiful letter. He told her that he
loved her, that he had always loved her since their first moment of
meeting, and he tried to express just the wave of tenderness that
inundated him at the thought of her away there in Italy. Once, he said,
he had dreamt that he would be the first to take her to Italy. Perhaps
some day they would yet be in Italy together.

Sec.2

It was only by insensible degrees that doubt crept into Mr. Brumley's
assurances. He did not observe at once that none of the brief letters
she wrote him responded to his second, the impassioned outbreak in
pencil. And it seemed only in keeping with the modest reserves of
womanhood that she should be restrained--she always had been restrained.

She asked him not to see her at once when she returned to England; she
wanted, she said, "to see how things are," and that fell in very well
with a certain delicacy in himself. The unburied body of Sir Isaac--it
was now provisionally embalmed--was, through some inexplicable subtlety
in his mind, a far greater barrier than the living man had ever been,
and he wanted it out of the way. And everything settled. Then, indeed,
they might meet.

Meanwhile he had a curious little private conflict of his own. He was
trying not to think, day and night he was trying not to think, that Lady
Harman was now a very rich woman. Yet some portions of his brain, and he
had never suspected himself of such lawless regions, persisted in the
most vulgar and outrageous suggestions, suggestions that made his soul
blush; schemes, for example, of splendid foreign travel, of hotel staffs
bowing, of a yacht in the Mediterranean, of motor cars, of a palatial
flat in London, of a box at the opera, of artists patronized, of--most
horrible!--a baronetcy.... The more authentic parts of Mr. Brumley
cowered from and sought to escape these squalid dreams of magnificences.
It shocked and terrified him to find such things could come out in him.
He was like some pest-stricken patient, amazedly contemplating his first
symptom. His better part denied, repudiated. Of course he would never
touch, never even propose--or hint.... It was an aspect he had never
once contemplated before Sir Isaac died. He could on his honour, and
after searching his heart, say that. Yet in Pall Mall one afternoon,
suddenly, he caught himself with a thought in his head so gross, so
smug,