I never saw the “young gentlemen” again. I suppose most men are cowards about calamities of that sort, the irremediable kind that have to be faced anew every morning. It takes a woman to shoulder such a lasting tragedy, and hug it to her . . . as I had seen Catherine doing; as I saw Mrs. Durant yearning to do . . .

It was about that very matter that I interviewed the old housekeeper the day after the funeral. Among the papers which the police found on poor Cranch’s desk was a letter addressed to me. Like his message to Mrs. Durant it was of the briefest. “I have appointed no one to care for my sons; I expected to outlive them. Their mother would have wished Catherine to stay with them. Will you try to settle all this mercifully? There is plenty of money, but my brain won’t work. Good-bye.”

It was a matter, first of all, for the law; but before we entered on that phase I wanted to have a talk with old Catherine. She came to me, very decent in her new black; I hadn’t the heart to go to that dreadful house again, and I think perhaps it was easier for her to speak out under another roof. At any rate, I soon saw that, after all the years of silence, speech was a relief; as it might have been to him too, poor fellow, if only he had dared! But he couldn’t; there was that pride of his, his “Spanish pride” as she called it.

“Not but what he would have hated me to say so, sir; for the Spanish blood in him, and all that went with it, was what he most abominated . . . But there it was, closer to him than his marrow . . . Oh, what that old woman done to us! He told me why, once, long ago — it was about the time when he began to understand that our little boys were never going to grow up like other young gentlemen. ‘It’s her doing, the devil,’ he said to me; and then he told me how she’d been a great Spanish heiress, a rich merchant’s daughter, and had been promised, in that foreign way they have, to a young nobleman who’d never set eyes on her; and when the bridegroom came to the city where she lived, and saw her sitting in her father’s box across the theatre, he turned about and mounted his horse and rode off the same night; and never a word came from him — the shame of it! It nigh killed her, I believe, and she swore then and there she’d marry a foreigner and leave Spain; and that was how she took up with young Mr. Cranch that was in her father’s bank; and the old gentleman put a big sum into the Cranch shipping business, and packed off the young couple to Harpledon . . . But the poor misbuilt thing, it seems, couldn’t ever rightly get over the hurt to her pride, nor get used to the cold climate, and the snow and the strange faces; she would go about pining for the orange-flowers and the sunshine; and though she brought her husband a son, I do believe she hated him, and was glad to die and get out of Harpledon . . . That was my Mr. Cranch’s story . . .

“Well, sir, he despised his great-grandfather more than he hated the Spanish woman. ‘Marry that twisted stick for her money, and put her poisoned blood in us I’ He used to put it that way, sir, in his bad moments. And when he was twenty-one, and travelling abroad, he met the young English lady I was maid to, the loveliest soundest young creature you ever set eyes on. They loved and married, and the next year — oh, the pity — the next year she brought him our young gentlemen . . . twins, they were . . . When she died, a few weeks after, he was desperate . . . more desperate than I’ve ever seen him till the other day. But as the years passed............