Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/145

 S I lay in that bed, in state, with the light very low, and the big doctor on one side of me and the trained nurse on the other, I began to feel about as important as the Queen of Sheba on fair-day in Ethiopia. It wasn't until later that the serious side of the whole thing came home to me.

It wasn't until I saw old Ezra Bartlett stand at the door, admitting the visitors one by one, with much the same apathetic resignation that Noah must have admitted the animals to the Ark, that the possibility of that situation having its darker side became plain to me. They may have been queer-looking people, that scattering of hungry-eyed relatives buzzing like wasps about a fallen pear. There may have been something ignominious in their stares of appraisal about that bewilderingly furnished house. But I was a bigger hypocrite than the rest of them. There was something more ignoble in my position than in any of theirs. I was an outsider, making profit from their grief. And I was the one who should first and last have been ashamed of myself.