I shall write to her.Good-bye," he said, and was gone before Mr.Louden could restore enough order out of the chaos in his mind to stop him.
Thus Mrs.Louden's long wait at the window was tragically rewarded, and she became an unhappy actor in Canaan's drama of that day.Other ladies attended at other windows, or near their front doors, throughout the afternoon: the families of the three patriarchs awaiting their return, as the time drew on, with something akin to frenzy.
Mrs.Flitcroft (a lady of temper), whose rheumatism confined her to a chair, had her grandson wheel her out upon the porch, and, as the dusk fell and she finally saw her husband coming at a laggard pace, leaning upon his cane, his chin sunk on his breast, she frankly told Norbert that although she had lived with that man more than fifty-seven years, she would never be able to understand him.She repeated this with genuine symptoms of hysteria when she discovered that the Colonel had not come straight from the Tabor house, but had stopped two hours at Peter Bradbury's to "talk it over."One item of his recital, while sufficiently startling to his wife, had a remarkable effect upon his grandson.This was the information that Ariel Tabor's fortune no longer existed.