There were a good many mentions of the explosion in New York, too, and hints, dark, but uncommonly straight, that the great Sunday School teacher had been the author and stage-manager of an awful comedy designed expressly to injure a firm of contractors against whom he had a standing grudge.  In proof of the assertion, the story went on to say that he had written four hours before the ‘accident’ happened to give warning of it to the young lady whom he was about to marry.  She was a neurasthenic young lady, and in spite of the warning she died very suddenly at the theatre from shock immediately after the explosion, and his note was found on her dressing-table when she was brought home dead.  Clearly, if the explosion had not been his work, and if he had been informed of it beforehand, he would have warned the police and the Department of Public Works at the same time.  The young lady’s untimely death had not prevented him from sailing for Europe three or four days later, and on the trip he had actually occupied alone the same ‘thousand dollar suite’ which he had previously engaged for himself and his bride.  From this detail the public might form some idea of the Nickelville magnate’s heartless character.  In fact, if one-half of what was written, telegraphed, and printed about Rufus Van Torp on both sides of the Atlantic during the next fortnight was to be believed, he had no character at all.

To all this he answered nothing, and he did not take the trouble to allude to the matter in the few letters he wrote to his acquaintances.  Day after day numbers of marked papers were carefully ironed and laid on the breakfast-table, after having been read and commented on in the servants’ hall.  The butler began to look askance at him, Mrs. Dubbs, the housekeeper, talked gloomily of giving warning, and the footmen gossiped with the stable hands; but the men all decided that it was not derogatory to their dignity to remain in the service of a master who was soon to be exhibited in the divorce court beside such a ’real lady’ as Lord Creedmore’s daughter; the housemaids agreed in this view, and the housekeeper consulted Miss More.  For Mrs. Dubbs was an imposing person, morally and physically, and had a character to lose; and though the place was a very good one for her old age, because the master only spent six weeks or two months at Oxley Paddox each year, and never found fault, yet Mrs. Dubbs was not going to have her name associated with that of a gentleman who blew up underground works and took Solomon’s view of the domestic affections.  She came of very good people in the north; one of her brothers was a minister, and the other was an assistant steward on a large Scotch estate.

Miss More’s quiet serenity was not at all disturbed by what was happening, for it could hardly be supposed that she was ignorant of the general attack on Mr. Van Torp, though he did not leave the papers lying about, where little Ida’s quick eyes might fall on a marked passage.  The housekeeper waited for an occasion when Mr. Van Torp had taken the child for a drive, as he often did, and Miss More was established in her favourite corner of the garden, just out of sight of the house.  Mrs. Dubbs first exposed the situation, then expressed a strong opinion as to her own respectability, and finally asked Miss More’s advice.