Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/161

 unfair to Aunt Cassie. No man, even Anson, would have placed himself against Olivia just then.

"If you must know, Cassie . . ." the old man said slowly. "It's a thing you won't want to hear. But if you must know, it is simply that Horace Pentland's body is at the station in Durham."

Olivia had a quick sense of the whited sepulcher beginning to crack, to fall slowly into bits.

At first Aunt Cassie only stared at them, snuffling and wiping her red eyes, and then she said, in an amazingly calm voice, "You see. . . . You never tell me anything. I never knew he was dead." There was a touch of triumph and vindication in her manner.

"There was no need of telling you, Cassie," said the old man. "You wouldn't let his name be spoken in the family for years. It was you—you and Anson—who made me threaten him into living abroad. Why should you care when he died?"

Aunt Cassie showed signs of breaking down once more. "You see, I'm always blamed for everything. I was thinking of the family all these years. We couldn't have Horace running around loose in Boston." She broke off with a sudden, fastidious gesture of disgust, as if she were washing her hands of the whole affair. "I could have managed it better myself. He ought never to have been brought home . . . to stir it all up again."

Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt Cassie. "He wanted to be buried here. . . . He wrote to ask me, when he was dying."

"He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his behavior. I say it again and I'll keep on saying it. He ought never to have been brought back here . . . after people even forgot whether he was alive or dead."

The perilous calm had settled over Olivia. . . . She had