e he hasn't been
having a drop too much, for once in a way? Why did he come round into
the garden?")

Darius loosed a really terrible sigh. "Yes," he answered, expressing
with a single word the most profound melancholy.

Four days previously Edwin and Maggie had seen their father considerably
agitated by an item of gossip, casually received, to which it seemed to
them he attached an excessive importance. Namely, that old Shushions,
having been found straying and destitute by the authorities appointed to
deal with such matters, had been taken to the workhouse and was dying
there. Darius had heard the news as though it had been a message
brought on horseback in a melodrama. "The Bastille!" he exclaimed, in a
whisper, and had left the house on the instant. Edwin, while the name
of Shushions reminded him of moments when he had most intensely lived,
was disposed to regard the case of Mr Shushions philosophically. Of
course it was a pity that Mr Shushions should be in the workhouse; but
after all, from what Edwin remembered and could surmise, the workhouse
would be very much the same as any other house to that senile mentality.
Thus Edwin had sagely argued, and Maggie had agreed with him. But to
them the workhouse was absolutely nothing but a name. They were no more
afraid of the workhouse than of the Russian secret police; and of their
father's early history they knew naught.

Mr Shushions had died in the workhouse, and Darius had taken his body
out of the workhouse, and had organised for it a funeral which was to be
rendered impressive by a procession of Turnhill Sunday school teachers.
Edwin's activity in connexion with the funeral had been limited to the
funeral cards, in the preparation of which his father had shown an
irritability more than usually offensive. And now the funeral was over.
Darius had devoted to it the whole of Home Rule Tuesday, and had
returned to his house at a singular hour and in a singular condition.

And Edwin, loathing sentimentality and full of the wisdom of nearly
thirty years, sedately pitied his father for looking ridiculous and
grotesque. He knew for a fact that his father did not see Mr Shushions
from one year's end to the next: hence they could not have been intimate
friends, or even friends: hence his father's emotion was throughout
exaggerated and sentimental. His acquaintance with history and with
biography told him that tyrants often carried sentimentality to the
absurd,