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