place as soon as your foot’s right. Until then I—I can manage perfectly well for the two of us. What about something to eat? Mrs. Skinner coming back to cook to-night?”—Mrs. Skinner is supposed to “do” for us. I often think that, in another sense, she will! “No. She’s off for the whole day to go to a funeral. You said she might, this morning.” “So I did. I thought it was a week ago—it feels like it. Well, I’ll get supper.” As I passed into our little dark cubby-hole of a kitchen, I saw something that I’d overlooked[25] before—a letter left lying on the mat, as it had dropped through the letter-box. I picked it up. It was addressed to me. And at the sight of the thin foreign envelope and the South African stamp my heart sank even lower. I had a presentiment that I hadn’t come to the worst yet. [25] It was a letter from my brother in Cape Town; poor old ne’er-do-weel Jack, who scarcely ever writes anything more than a picture postcard with a view of the Cape of Good Hope, or something of that kind, unless he’s in trouble and wants something. With a sigh I took out the crackling, scrawled sheet; and my eyes fell on the last sentences first. “You’ll have to get the money for me, old girl. You know you can if you try. Ask Vandeleur to lend it to us; he’d do anything for you. Haven’t got his address, or I would have written to him myself. I am absolutely on the rocks, so don’t wait. You’ll have to wire a hundred pounds to the Bank here——” A hundred pounds? Mightn’t he just as well have said “a million”? What was all this about? I took the letter into my own little room and sat down on the camp-bed to read it through.... [26] [26] In five minutes I have grasped all that I can take in at present of the situation; an old one. Jack is in trouble, worse trouble than ever before. Debts; an I O U that was to fall due in six weeks. Threatened exposure of—something that he doesn’t explain. “A business affair?” Yes; Mr. Dundonald is quite right. I have “no head for business routine.” My head’s going round with the bewilderment of it. It can’t mean that Jack, my own brother, Father’s only son—one of the Trants—has been “not quite straight” with the accounts that are in his care? He
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