And that moment would have been as good for all three, even without the fifty-pound note.

CHAPTER XIV

THE GREAT EVENT OF MR. TALBOT’S LIFE

I realize that any attempt henceforth to enchain the reader’s interest with church meetings, or the like enthralments, will be more than hopeless.  That is the worst of allowing love to creep into one’s story.  He insists on having the stage to himself, and in that determination the audience is entirely with him.  Previously you may have been interested in all kinds of peaceable, unexciting things, far more good for you, but enter love, and all the rest is suddenly fallen tame beyond endurance.

It is of no use to urge that life’s bill of the play includes many hardly less brilliant and attractive performers.  They are all well enough in their way, till the eternal Paganini is there with his old fiddle once more at his shoulder; then there is an end of all seriousness, or a beginning, as you please.

Well, I’ll do my best to get over the six months between March and October as quickly as possible; and, indeed, it will not be very difficult, after all, for very little happened, to speak of, during that time to any of the chief actors engaged in making this history.

Perhaps it was this consideration that prompted old Mr. Talbot—­O, bother old Mr. Talbot!—­that prompted old Mr. Talbot, I say, to take the important step of dying, when, poor old man! his death would give the least possible trouble.

There seemed as little reason for his dying as there had seemed for his living, for as far as anyone knew there was nothing the matter with him, except an extreme sleepiness of an evening, which was but natural in an old weary man who still kept at his stone-masonry though he was full seventy.

Night after night, for some weeks, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier.

“Why, dad, I never saw such an old sleepy-head”—­his wife had rallied him good-naturedly one night, looking at him with a sudden odd expression in her face.

“Eh, lass, but I was noddin’ and no mistake,” said the old man, struggling drowsily with the heaviness, and presently succumbing once more.

“He’s off again,” said Mrs. Talbot to herself, as she lifted the lid of a pent saucepan in which some boiled onions were mightily bubbling in a wild little world of steam.

Presently the old man sighed deeply,—­so you would have thought; but Mrs. Talbot, hurrying to him, knew that he had tried to say “Jane,” and had said it for the last time.

Yes, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier; all his life he had been trying to sleep, and at last he slept.