“I hear the children are dying like flies.”

“I can do nothing,” said Faversham.

Again a shock of antagonism passed through the two men.  “Yes, you can!” thought Tatham; “you can resign your fat post, and your expectations, and put the screw on the old man, that’s what you could do.”  Aloud he said: 

“A couple of thousand pounds, according to Undershaw, would do the job.  If you succeed in forcing them out, where are they to go?”

“That’s not our affair.”

Tatham caught up his hat and stick, and abruptly departed; reflecting indeed when he reached the street, that he had not been the most diplomatic of ambassadors on Mrs. Melrose’s behalf.

Faversham, after some ten minutes of motionless reflection, heavily returned to his papers, ordering his horse to be ready in half an hour.  He forced himself to write some ordinary business letters, and to eat some lunch, and immediately after he started on horseback to find his way through the October lanes to the village of Mainstairs.

A man more harassed, and yet more resolved, it would have been difficult to find.  For six weeks now he had been wading deeper and deeper into a moral quagmire from which he saw no issue at all—­except indeed by the death of Edmund Melrose!  That event would solve all difficulties.

For some time now he had been convinced, not only that the mother and daughter were living, but that there had been some recent communication between them and Melrose.  Various trifling incidents and cryptic sayings of the old man, not now so much on his guard as formerly, had led Faversham to this conclusion.  He realized that he himself had been haunted of late by the constant expectation that they might turn up.

Well, now they had turned up.  Was he at once to make way for them, as Tatham clearly took for granted?—­to advise Melrose to tear up his newly made will, and gracefully surrender his expectations as Melrose’s heir to this girl of twenty-one?  By no means!

What is the claim of birth in such a case, if you come to that?  Look at it straight in the face.  A child is born to a certain father; is then torn from that father against his will, and brought up for twenty years out of his reach.  What claim has that child, when mature, upon the father—­beyond, of course, a claim for reasonable provision—­unless he chooses to acknowledge a further obligation?  None whatever.  The father has lived his life, and accumulated his fortune, without the child’s help, without the child’s affection or tendance.  His possessions are morally and legally his own, to deal with as he pleases.