Peter had shaken his head. "I won't till he wants to. I don't want to
bother him, you see."
"He does want to," Lucy had told him. "Of course he does. Only he thinks
_you_ don't. That's what's so silly."
They had left it there for the present. Some day Peter meant to walk into
Denis's rooms and say, "Don't be stupid. This can't go on." But the day
hadn't come yet. If it had been Denis who had done the shady thing and
was in penury and dishonour thereby, it would have been so simple. But
that was inconceivable; such things didn't happen to Denis; and as it was
it was not simple.
Peter got out of his hot bed on to his hot floor, and made for the
bathroom. There was only one bathroom in the boarding-house, but there
was no great competition for it, so Peter had his bath in peace, and
sang a tune in it as was his custom, and came back to his hot room and
put on his hot clothes (his less tidy clothes, because it was the day of
joy), and came down to breakfast at 9:25.
Most of the other boarders had got there before him. It was a mixed
boarding-house, and contained at the moment two gentlemen besides Hilary
and Peter, and five ladies besides Peggy and Rhoda. They were on
the whole a happy and even gay society, and particularly on Sundays.
Peggy, looking up from the tea-cups, gave Peter a broad smile, and Rhoda
gave him a little subdued one, and Peter looked pleased to see everyone;
he always did, even on Mondays.
"I'm sure your brother hasn't a care in the world," an envious lady
boarder had once said to Peggy; "he's always so happy-looking."
This was the lady who was saying, as Peter entered, "And my mother's last
words were, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave.' Elizabeth Dean was an author,
you know--oh, very well known, I believe. She treated my mother and me
none too well; didn't stand by us when she should have--but we won't say
anything about that now. Anyhow, it was a costly funeral--forty pounds
and eight horses--and my mother hadn't an idea where she was laid. So she
said, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave,' just like that. And the strange
thing was that in the first churchyard I walked into, in a little village
down in Sussex, there was a tombstone, 'Elizabeth Dean, 65. The Lord gave
and the Lord hath taken away.' Wasn't that queer, now? So I went straight
and...."
"The woman's a fool," muttered the gentleman next Peter, a cynical-faced
commercial traveller. Peter had heard the remark from him frequently
before, and did not feel called upon to reply to it.
But the tale of Elizabeth Dean was interrupted by a lady of a speculative
habit of mind.
"Now I want to ask you all, _should_ one put up a tombstone to the
departed? I've been having quite a kick-up with my sisters about it
lately. Hadn't one better spend the money on the living? What do _you_
think, Miss Matthews?"
Miss Matthews said she liked to see a handsome headstone.
"After all, one honours them that way. It's all one can do for them,
isn't it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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