In the pocket of his
coat Winifred found the letter that he had written her the night before
he left New York, water-soaked and illegible, but because of its length,
she knew it had been meant for her.
For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled
upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end.
His harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have
retrieved himself. Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident the
disaster he had once foretold.
When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say
whether he did well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to
be. The mind that society had come to regard as a powerful and reliable
machine, dedicated to its service, may for a long time have been sick
within itself and bent upon its own destruction.
EPILOGUE
Professor Wilson had been living in London for six years and he was just
back from a visit to America. One afternoon, soon after his return, he
put on his frock-coat and drove in a hansom to pay a call upon Hilda
Burgoyne, who still lived at her old number, off Bedford Square. He
and Miss Burgoyne had been fast friends for a long time. He had first
noticed her about the corridors of the British Museum, where he read
constantly. Her being there so often had made him feel that he would
like to know her, and as she was not an inaccessible person, an
introduction was not difficult. The preliminaries once over, they came
to depend a great deal upon each other, and Wilson, after his day's
reading, often went round to Bedford Square for his tea.
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