go to his office if I was at Saint X. He won’t go to see anybody who’s able to move about.  ’As they want me, let ’em come to me, just as I’d go to them if I wanted them,’ he says.  ‘The air they get on the way is part of the cure.’  Besides, he and I had a quarrel.  He was talking his nonsense against religion, and I said something, and he implied I wasn’t as straight in business as I should be—­quoted something about ’He that hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent,’ and one thing led to another, and finally he said, with that ugly jeer of his:  ’You pious bandits are lucky to have a forgiving God to go to.  Now we poor devils have only our self-respect, and it never forgives anything.’” Whitney laughed, reflected, laughed again.  “Yes, I must see Schulze.  Maybe—­Anyhow, I’m going to Saint X—­going home, or as near home as anything my money has left me.”

He drowsed off.  She sat watching him—­the great beak, the bulging forehead, the thin, cruel lips; and everywhere in the garden of artificial flowers which formed the surface of her nature, hiding its reality even from herself, there appeared the poisonous snakes of hateful thoughts to shoot their fangs and hiss at him.  She shrank and shuddered; yet—­“It’s altogether his own fault that I feel this way toward him as he lies dying,” she said to herself, resorting to human nature’s unfailing, universally sought comforter in all trying circumstances—­self-excuse.  “He always was cold and hard.  He has become a monster.  And even in his best days he wasn’t worthy to have such a woman as I am.  And now he is thinking of cheating me—­and will do it—­unless God prevents him.”

He drowsed on, more asleep than awake, not even rousing when they put him to bed.  He did not go to Saint X that day.  But he did go later—­went to lie in state in the corridor of the splendid hall he had given Tecumseh; to be gaped at by thousands who could not see that they were viewing a few pounds of molded clay, so busy were their imaginations with the vast fortune it was supposed he left; to be preached over, the sermon by Dr. Hargrave, who believed in him—­and so, in estimating the man as distinguished from what the system he lived under had made of him, perhaps came nearer the truth than those who talked only of the facts of his public career—­his piracy, his bushwhacking, his gambling with the marked cards and loaded dice of “high finance”; to be buried in the old Cedar Grove Cemetery, with an imposing monument presently over him, before it fresh flowers every day for a year—­the Marchioness of St. Berthe contracted with a florist to attend to that.

* * * * *

Four days after the funeral Janet sent a servant down to Adelaide and to Mrs. Ranger with notes begging them to come to Point Helen for lunch.  “We are lonely and so dreary,” she wrote Adelaide.  “We want you—­need you.”  Only one answer was possible, and at half-past twelve they set out in Mrs. Ranger’s carriage.  As they drove away from the Villa d’Orsay Mrs. Ranger said:  “When does Mrs. Dorsey allow to come home?”