His Excellency had exalted—­at himself, for instance.  And what then?  However conscientiously he might henceforward edit the report, he realized that his position was no longer secure; he was liable to be recalled at any moment—­to cede his place to some candidate of the opposing faction.  Those damned republics!  Or the post, being a purely honorary one created expressly for himself by the obliging and now defunct Don Pomponio, might be permanently abolished.  It was not a pleasant prospect.  Mr. Freddy Parker was rather too old to start knocking about the world again.  He was losing what he called his “nerve.”  What was to be done?

He tugged at his beard and puffed furious clouds of smoke out of his briar pipe.  He thought of another grief—­another source of anxiety.  The quarterly remissions forwarded to him by certain obscure but respectable relatives in England, under the condition that he should never again set foot in that land of honest men, had not arrived.  It was two weeks overdue.  What had happened?  Had they decided to cancel it?  They had threatened to do so ere now.  And if so, how was he going to live?  It was a facer, that was.  The equivalent of fifteen pounds sterling was urgently necessary at that very moment.  Fifteen pounds.  Who would lend him fifteen pounds?  Keith?  Not likely.  Keith was a miser—­a Scotchman, ten to one.  Koppen?  He had once already tried to touch him for a loan, with discouraging results.  A most unsympathetic millionaire.  Almost offensive, the older bounder had been.  Perhaps somebody had let on about that bit of crepe de Chine preserved at the Residency, and its uses as a sociological document.  How things got about on Nepenthe!  Where the Hell, then, was money to come from?

Both these troubles, great in themselves, faded into insignificance before a new and overwhelming sorrow.

In a room directly overhead lay the dead body of his lady.  She had breathed her last on the previous midday, and it is more than likely that the noise of the cannon-shots, reverberating through her chamber, had accelerated her end; not the noise as such, for she was naturally a rowdy woman and never felt comfortable save in an atmosphere of domestic explosions and quarrels with servants, but the noise in its social significance, the noise as demonstrating to her exhausted consciousness that there was something wrong, something at the same time of considerable importance—­something she might never live to comment on—­happening in the market-place.  In other words, it is highly probable that her death had been hastened by the moral rather than the physical shock of the noise; by disappointment; by the bitter reflection that she would never survive to learn what this new scandal, evidently an interesting one, was about.

The doctor, for reasons which he deemed sufficient, had recommended a speedy interment; it was fixed for that morning.  The fall of ashes had put the ceremony out of the question.  There she lay.  And in the room below sat her bereaved stepbrother, distractedly gazing out of the window upon the darkness of Erebus.