Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed.
"Mamie," he said to his wife, when he came out
of the spare room half an hour later,
"will you take Mrs. Alexander the things
she needs? She is going to do everything
herself. Just stay about where you can
hear her and go in if she wants you."
Everything happened as Alexander had
foreseen in that moment of prescience under
the river. With her own hands she washed
him clean of every mark of disaster. All night
he was alone with her in the still house,
his great head lying deep in the pillow.
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.
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