Meantime she refused to be duped by Ministers or by amiable go-betweens.  She resolved instead, perhaps for the last time, to resume the clothes and status of David Williams, go down to Wales, and stay with her father who was dying by slow degrees.

The letters which the curate had written from time to time to D.V.  Williams, Esq., care of Michael Rossiter, Esq., F.R.S., and usually forwarded on by Bertie Adams, had told David how much the Revd.  Howel Williams had failed since the cold spring of 1909, and how in the colder spring of 1910 he had once or twice narrowly survived influenza.  In July, 1910, he was dying of heart failure.  Nevertheless the return of David, his well-beloved, brought to him a flicker of renewed life, a little pink in the cheeks, and some garrulity.

He could hardly bear his darling son out of his sight, except for the narrowest margin of necessary sleep; and often David slept sitting up in an arm-chair in the Vicar’s bedroom.  The Revd.  Howel said nothing more about grandchildren; often—­with a finer sense—­spoke to him not as though he were a son, but as a beloved daughter.  At last he died in his sleep one night, holding David’s hand, looking so ineffably happy that the impostor inwardly gloried in his imposture as in one of the best deeds of his chequered life.

* * * * *

The will, of course, had not been changed, and David inherited all his “father’s” property.  Out of it he settled L500 on the miner’s—­or rather Jenny’s—­son who probably was the offspring of the real David Williams’s boyish amour.  He provided a handsome annuity for poor, shaken, old Nannie; and the rest of the money after paying all expenses he laid out on the endowment of a Village Hall for games and study, social meetings and political discussions, together with provision for an annual stipend of a hundred pounds for the Vicar or curate of the parish who should run this Hall:  which was to be a lasting memorial to the Reverend Howel Vaughan Williams, so learned in the lore of Wales.

Having settled all these matters to his satisfaction, and certainly to that of the Revd.  Cadwalladr Jones (who succeeded as Vicar of Pontystrad by a wise nudging and monetary pressure on the part of the late Vicar’s son), David returned to London at the close of 1910, took off his clothes and shed his personality.  It was bruited that he had gone abroad to nurse a health that was seriously impaired through his incredible exertions over the Shillito case.  He left his cousin Vivie free to espouse the Suffrage cause, even unto the extremest militancy.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT