Page:Bailey - Call Mr Fortune (Dutton, 1921).djvu/271

260 died because he didn't want to go on living. And his wife broke her heart over it. She seemed like a woman frightened out of her senses, my father says. She got it into her head that it was all her brother's fault, that he had planned the whole thing. It was absurd, of course, but can you wonder?"

"I don't wonder," said Reggie.

"She was deadly afraid of her brother. She made up her mind that he would be the death of her baby too. So she ran away from Liverpool and hid in a little village in North Wales, Llanfairfechan, and nobody knew where she had gone. She had a little money of her own, and her husband had been well insured. She had just enough, and she lived quite alone in a cottage off the road to the mountains, and there she died. My father says her son did rather well. He got scholarships to Oxford, and my father fancies he went into the Civil Service, but he lost sight of him after the mother died."

"I'm infinitely obliged to you. Miss Amber," said Reggie, and rang for tea.

"Oh, no, don't! I always thought that poor woman's story was too miserably sad. I don't know why you wanted it—no, no, I'm not asking—but if it could set anything right, or do anybody any good, it seems somehow to make it better. It wouldn't be so uselessly cruel."

"Over the past the gods themselves have no power," Reggie said. "We can't help her, poor