Читать книгу And Five Were Foolish онлайн

13 страница из 67

The Closeley Dores had four daughters.

My child, wrote Mrs. Sheraton Forbes to Sarah, I know so well that dreadful sense of loneliness, which gnaws the aching heart. Come back to Fairlands with us on Saturday. We will leave you entirely to yourself, but I should like to think that my dear old friend’s sweet ward had someone to turn to in this darkest hour. The world is so hard....

Mrs. Sheraton Forbes had three sons.

It was a dreadful business....

Then the announcement appeared, and the sympathy died down. It was generally, if grudgingly, admitted that Virgil and Sarah had done the right thing. Crestfallen mothers, consoled by the reflection that, even if they had lost the prize, nobody else had won it, agreed that it was what ‘that old Tantamount’ would have wished. Some said, sniffing, that his death had drawn the two together.

Finally, the contents of the Will had become public property.

The effect upon the matrons of Mayfair was electrical. With, I think, the slightest encouragement, the late millionaire would have been burned in effigy. As for the two legatees, the outburst of execration with which their determination was posthumously and somewhat illogically received, beggars description.