Mr. Baffall stopped in the act of pulling on a glove, and stared out of
the window at the stranger. He called in a whisper to Patience, and
nodded towards the man, and looked inquiringly at the old woman. She
shook her head.
"Don't know, I'm sure," she whispered. Then, in lingering tones of half
remembrance, she added slowly: "And yet I seem to know the face--seem to
remember----"
The man in black made no attempt to come into the house; he waited until
the melancholy little procession was formed, and then fell in behind Mr.
Baffall. Mrs. Baffall had gone to the churchyard, and Patience went by
the way across the fields, and met her there. So that it came about that
Mr. Baffall and the man in black were the only people who followed.
Someone had knocked softly at the door of Anthony Ditchburn's room; but
he had cried out in a frightened, whimpering voice that he was not well,
and that they were to go away. Mr. Baffall did not care to say
anything, or to question the man in black; he had known so little of
Paul himself that he thought it possible this might be an old friend or
acquaintance.
The Rev. Temple Purdue must have been thinking of something else at one
part of the service, for he began a line from quite another place.
"Forasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these----"
Then he checked himself hurriedly, and went on with the proper words;
but Baffall glanced at Mrs. Baffall, and thought perhaps the little slip
not so wrong after all.
As Mr. Baffall, at the end of everything, was replacing his hat and
turning towards his home, the man in black touched him on the elbow, and
tendered a card. Baffall, in some surprise, mechanically took it, but
did not look at it; instead, he looked at the man in black, and decided
that he did not like him. Then his eyes travelled to the card, and he
read the name upon it--"Mr. Matthew Shandler."
Baffall looked up at the man, and back again at the card. The man
cleared his throat, and sighed, and ventured an explanation.
"A--a second cousin--on his father's side," he murmured. "So far as I am
aware, his sole living relative; and I have made every inquiry. But
perhaps he left a will."
Mr. Baffall felt his heart sink; as he expressed it afterwards to Mrs.
Baffall, he "knew directly it was all up with the children." Being a man
of business, however, he invited Mr. Matthew Shandler to come home with
him and discuss the situation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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