Much better in spirits, Piers returned to the hotel.  Yes, after all, he would copy out those verses of his, and send them to Miss Derwent.  They were not bad; they came from his heart, and they might speak to hers.  Just his name at the end; no address.  If she desired to write to him, she could easily learn his address from Mrs. Hannaford.  He would send them!

“A telegram for you, sir,” said the porter, as he entered.

Wondering, he opened it.

“Your father has suddenly died.  Hope this will reach you in time.

EMMA OTWAY.”

For a minute or two, the message was meaningless.  He stood reading and re-reading the figures which indicated hour of despatch and of delivery.  Presently he asked for a railway-guide, and with shaking hands, with agony of mental confusion, sought out the next train northwards.  There was just time to catch it; not time to pack his bag.  He rushed out to the cab.

CHAPTER XIV

“The circumstances are these.  On the day after I said good-bye to him, my father went for his usual morning walk, and was absent for two hours.  He returned looking very pale and disturbed, and with some difficulty was persuaded (you know how he disliked speaking of himself) to tell what had happened.  It seems that, somewhere on the lonely road, he came across two men, honest-looking country folk, engaged in a violent quarrel; their language made it clear that one accused the other of some sort of slander, a very trivial affair.  Just as my father came up to them, they began fighting.  He interfered, tried to separate them—­as he would have done, I am sure, had they been armed with pistols, for the sight of fighting was intolerable to him, it put him beside himself with a sort of passionate disgust.  They were great strong fellows, and one of them, whether intentionally or not, dealt him a fierce blow on the chest, knocking him down.  That put an end to the fight.  My father had to sit by the roadside for a time before he could go home.

“The next day he did not look well, but spent his time as usual, and on the morning after, he seemed to be all right again.  The next day again he went for his walk, and did not return.  When his absence became alarming, messengers were sent to look for him, and by one of these he was found lying on the moorside, dead.  The postmortem showed that the blow he had received affected the heart, which was already diseased (he did not know that).  Of course the man who struck him cannot be discovered, and I don’t know that it matters.  My father would no doubt have been glad to foresee such a death as this.  It was sudden (for that he always hoped), and it came of a protest against the thing he most hated, brutal violence.”

So Piers Otway wrote in a letter to John Jacks.  He did not add that his father had died intestate, but of that he was aware before any inquiries had been set on foot; in one of their last talks, Jerome had expressly told his son that he would shortly make a will, not having hitherto been able to decide how his possessions should be distributed.  This intestacy meant (if Daniel Otway had spoken truth) that Piers would have no fruit whatever of his father’s promises; that his recent hopes and schemes would straightway fall to the ground.