on seeing in The Times, after I had been a week or two in Munich
and before, as I knew, Corvick had reached London, the announcement
of the sudden death of poor Mrs. Erme. I instantly, by letter,
appealed to Gwendolen for particulars, and she wrote me that her
mother had yielded to long-threatened failure of the heart. She
didn't say, but I took the liberty of reading into her words, that
from the point of view of her marriage and also of her eagerness,
which was quite a match for mine, this was a solution more prompt
than could have been expected and more radical than waiting for the
old lady to swallow the dose. I candidly admit indeed that at the
time--for I heard from her repeatedly--I read some singular things
into Gwendolen's words and some still more extraordinary ones into
her silences. Pen in hand, this way, I live the time over, and it
brings back the oddest sense of my having been, both for months and
in spite of myself, a kind of coerced spectator. All my life had
taken refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to
have committed itself to keep astare. There were days when I
thought of writing to Hugh Vereker and simply throwing myself on
his charity. But I felt more deeply that I hadn't fallen quite so
low--besides which, quite properly, he would send me about my
business. Mrs. Erme's death brought Corvick straight home, and
within the month he was united "very quietly"--as quietly, I seemed
to make out, as he meant in his article to bring out his
trouvaille--to the young lady he had loved and quitted. I use this
last term, I may parenthetically say, because I subsequently grew
sure that at the time he went to India, at the time of his great
news from Bombay, there had been no positive pledge between them
whatever. There had been none at the moment she was affirming to
me the very opposite. On the other hand he had certainly become
engaged the day he returned. The happy pair went down to Torquay