“I shall communicate with him at once,” said Mr. Fowler.  His court-room manner had bourgeoned into his best drawing-room blend of faintly implied gallantry and deep consideration.  One almost caught Winter getting out of the lap of Spring.  Then the three heads which had unconsciously leaned together suddenly straightened up and turned in the same direction.

Hugh stood almost over them.  In one hand he held his aunt’s knitting, which he had mechanically rescued from the cat.  Now he drew out one of the ivory needles and snapped it into accurate halves.  “This is atrocious!” he said, with care and precision.  His voice shook.  “I shall not touch a cent of it and”—­he embraced his uncle and aunt in the same devastating look—­“neither will you if you have any sense of decency.”

“I think—­”

“It doesn’t matter remotely what you—­we think sir.  What matters is what Uncle Hugh thought.”  He turned to Mrs. Shirley with an extraordinary softening of tone.  “Couldn’t you keep it?  When he died ... in the room over this”—­with a little gasp her glance flew to the ceiling as though this topographical detail had brought her a sharp realization of that long-past scene—­“he made us promise that you should have it, all of it.  He felt that you needed it; he worried about it.”

“Oh, how kind of him—­how kind!” cried the little woman.  The poignancy of her voice cut into his disappointment like a sharp ray of light.  “Even then—­to think of me.  But don’t you understand that he wouldn’t want me to—­to take anything that I felt I ought not to take?”

“That’s the way out,” rippled across Mr. Fowler’s face.  He was experiencing a variety of mental disturbances, but this came to the surface just in time for Hugh to catch it.

“Oh well,” he murmured, wearily.  “Only, none for this deficient child, thank you.”  He walked to the window and stood looking out into the blown spring green of the elm opposite.  His ebbed anger had left a residuum of stubbornness.  There was still an act of justice to be consummated and the position of grand-justicer offered a certain righteous attraction.  As he reminded himself, if you put your will to work on a difficult action you were fain to commit, after a while the will worked automatically and your mind functioned without aid from you, and the action bloomed of itself.  This kinetic process was a constant device of the freakish impulse that he called his devil.  He deliberately laid the train.

“There is one more thing,” the alien was saying.  Her voice had gained a wonderful fluency amid the general thaw.  “I didn’t dare to ask before, but if we thought of me then—­I have always hoped he left some message for me ... a letter, perhaps.”

Hugh smiled agreeably.  “In just a moment,” he considered, “I am going to do something so outrageous that I can’t even imagine how my dear families are going to take it.”  He was about to hurt them severely, but that was all right.  His uncle was a tempered weapon of war that despised quarter; and as for Aunt Maria, he rather wanted to hurt Aunt Maria for her own good.