Patricia and Jack were as a matter of course “better off,” then—­and, miraculously purged of faults, with all their defects somehow remedied, the colonel’s wife and brother, with Agatha and the colonel’s other interred relatives, were partaking of dignified joys in bright supernal iridescent realms, which the colonel resignedly looked forward to entering, on some comfortably remote day or another, and thus rejoining his transfigured kindred....  Such was the colonel’s charitable decision, in the forming whereof logic was in no way implicated.  For religion, as the colonel would have told you sedately, was not a thing to be reasoned about.  Attempting to do that, you became in Rudolph Musgrave’s honest eyes regrettably flippant.

Meanwhile Cousin Lucy Fentnor was taking care of the colonel and little Roger.  And Lichfield, long before the lettering on Patricia’s tombstone had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave, upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial arrangement, without provoking scandal’s tongue to more than a jocose innuendo or two when people met for “auction”—­that new-fangled perplexing variant of bridge, just introduced, wherein you bid on the suits....  And, besides, Cousin Lucy Fentnor (as befitted any one born an Allardyce) was to all accounts a notable housekeeper, famed alike for the perilous glassiness of her hardwood floors, her dexterous management of servants, her Honiton-braid fancy-work (familiar to every patron of Lichfield charity bazaars), and her unparalleled calves-foot jelly.  Under Cousin Lucy Fentnor’s systematized coddling little Roger grew like the proverbial ill weed, and the colonel likewise waxed perceptibly in girth.

Thus it was that accident and a woman’s intervention seemed once more to combine in shielding Rudolph Musgrave from discomfort.  And in consequence it was considered improbable that at this late day the colonel would do the proper thing by Clarice Pendomer, as, at the first tidings of Patricia’s death, had been authentically rumored among the imaginative; and, in fact, Lichfield no longer considered that necessary.  The claim of outraged morality against these two had been thrown out of court, through some unworded social statute of limitation, as far as Lichfield went.  Of course it was interesting to note that the colonel called at Mrs. Pendomer’s rather frequently nowadays; but, then, Clarice Pendomer had all sorts of callers now—­though not many in skirts—­and she played poker with men for money until unregenerate hours of the night, and was reputed with a wealth of corroborative detail to have even less discussable sources of income:  so that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been born a Bellingham....  But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital aspirations of Cousin Lucy Fentnor.