Reality was a thing of the past.  A nightmare had taken its place, a nightmare from which there was no waking.  He considered the stability of his days—­a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced his joys.  It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command.  Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible.  His thought, strung to a new morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, with painful, vivid stroke upon stroke, the insufferable series of events that lay before him.

Life was become a bizarre and brutal business for a man of fine feeling.  He would be thrust into the pitiless mouth of sensation-mongers, called to appear before tribunals, subjected to an inquisition of his fellow-men, made to endure a notoriety infinitely odious even in anticipation.  Indeed, Sir Walter’s simple intellect wallowed in anticipation, and so suffered much that, given exercise of restraint, he might have escaped altogether.  He was brave enough, but personal bravery would not be called for.  He sat now staring dumbly at an imaginary series of events abominable and unseemly in every particular to his order of mind.  He was so concerned with what the future must hold in store for him that for a time the present quite escaped his thoughts.

He returned to it, however, and it was almost with the shock of a new surprise he remembered that Peter Hardcastle, a man of European repute, had just died in his house.  But he could not in the least realize the new tragedy.  He had as yet barely grasped the truth of his son-in-law’s end, and still often found himself expecting Tom’s footfall and his jolly voice.  That such an abundant vitality was stilled, that such an infectious laugh would never sound again on mortal ear he yet sometimes found it hard to believe.

But now it seemed that the impact of this second blow rammed home the first.  He brooded upon his dead son-in-law, and it was long before he returned to the event of that day.  A thought struck him, and though elementary enough, it seemed to Sir Walter an important conclusion.  There could be no shadow of doubt that Tom May and Peter Hardcastle had died by the same secret force.  He felt that he must remember this.

Again he puzzled, and then decided with himself that, if he meant to keep sane, he must practice faith and trust in God.  Septimus May had said that such unparalleled things sometimes happened in the world to try man’s faith.  Doubtless he was right.