All except Dudley passed in.

Mr. Barmby wanted more advice, his dilemma being acute.  It was moderated, though not more than moderated, when he was informed of the death of Mrs. Burman Radnor; an event that occurred, according to Jarniman’s report, forty-five minutes after Skepsey had a second time called for information of it at the house in Regent’s Park—­five hours and a half, as Colney made his calculation, after the death of Nataly.  He was urged by some spur of senseless irony to verify the calculation and correct it in the minutes.

Dudley crossed the road.  No sign of the awful interior was on any of the windows of the house either to deepen awe or relieve.  They were blank as eyeballs of the mindless.  He shivered.  Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes, to set the unwounded speculating whether indeed a stricken man, who has become the cause of woeful trouble, may not be pointing a moral.  Pacing on the Park side of the house, he saw Skepsey drive up and leap out with a gentleman, Mr. Radnor’s lawyer.  Could it be, that there was no Will written?  Could a Will be executed now?  The moral was more forcibly suggested.  Dudley beheld this Mr. Victor Radnor successful up all the main steps, persuasive, popular, brightest of the elect of Fortune, felled to the ground within an hour, he and all his house!  And if at once to pass beneath the ground, the blow would have seemed merciful for him.  Or if, instead of chattering a mixture of the rational and the monstrous, he had been heard to rave like the utterly distraught.  Recollection of some of the things he shouted, was an anguish:  A notion came into the poor man, that he was the dead one of the two, and he cried out:  ’Cremation?  No, Colney’s right, it robs us of our last laugh.  I lie as I fall.’  He ’had a confession for his Nataly, for her only, for no one else.’  He had ‘an Idea.’  His begging of Dudley to listen without any punctilio (putting a vulgar oath before it), was the sole piece of unreasonableness in the explanation of the idea:  and that was not much wilder than the stuff Dudley had read from reports of Radical speeches.  He told Dudley he thought him too young to be ’best man to a widower about to be married,’ and that Barmby was ’coming all haste to do the business, because of no time to spare.’

Dudley knew but the half, and he did not envy Dartrey Fenellan his task of watching over the wreck of a splendid intelligence, humouring and restraining.  According to the rumours, Mr. Radnor had not shown the symptoms before the appearance of his daughter.  For awhile he hung, and then fell, like an icicle.  Nesta came with a cry for her father.  He rose:  Dartrey was by.  Hugged fast in iron muscles, the unhappy creature raved of his being a caged lion.  These things Dudley had heard in the house.

There are scenes of life proper to the grave-cloth.

Nataly’s dead body was her advocate with her family, with friends, with the world.  Victor had more need of a covering shroud to keep calamity respected.  Earth makes all sweet:  and we, when the privilege is granted us, do well to treat the terribly stricken as if they had entered to the bosom of earth.