"'And there is Rosamund. She has asked me to make her a widow, and I mean to, God willing; she wants to stand alone, and she has earned it. But I have stood alone for twenty years since your aunt died, my boy, and I would not wish it on anyone I loved. She will be a widow with forty thousand pounds and a fen full of people depending on her, and Digby Rendell at her throat, and no one at her back.
"'So I have done a thing which I dare say is wicked. If I die before October I have tied the two of you together. Not for money. You need no money and she will not take any. I have tied you because you each have the thing the other lacks. She can see, and you can stand. She knows every family on the fen by name, and every yard of the Lode, and how the engine is fed; you know how a bank is built and how a hundred men are made to work together in the dark. Neither of you will ask the other for anything. You will have to be made.
"'I have made it so that either of you may refuse and lose only money, and the fen. I could not make it so that either of you could refuse and lose nothing. That is the price of being managed by an old man who never learned how to ask.
"'If you have come, you came angry. Good. Anger kept me on my feet for seventy years. But do not let it keep you from her.
"'I don't ask you to love her. I am not such a fool. I ask you to let her see for you, and to stand by her while she does it. The rest you may settle between yourselves, and I shall not be there to interfere, which I expect you will both find a great relief.
"'Your affectionate uncle,
"'Ellerholt.
"'Postscript. Tell her I am sorry I could not make her a widow. Tell her it was not because I thought she could not bear it alone. It was because I knew she could.'"
Her voice had held all the way to the end. On the last line it broke. She put the sheets down on the desk and sat with both hands flat on top of them, as if to keep them from blowing away, and wept: not quietly, now, not with one tear under a veil, but helplessly, with her head down and her shoulders shaking, the way a child weeps who has held it in too long.
He came round the desk. He did not know what to do. In the end he knelt beside her chair and put his arms round her, mud-stained bombazine and all, and she turned her face into his shoulder and cried there until the candles had burned down an inch.