A chapter
of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to
inevitable death.
Not much more than a month later I was in London; and after I
had arranged certain matters which claimed my immediate
attention, thinking Mrs. Strickland might like to hear what I
knew of her husband's last years, I wrote to her. I had not
seen her since long before the war, and I had to look out her
address in the telephone-book. She made an appointment, and I went
to the trim little house on Campden Hill which she now inhabited.
She was by this time a woman of hard on sixty, but she
bore her years well, and no one would have taken her for
more than fifty. Her face, thin and not much lined, was of
the sort that ages gracefully, so that you thought in youth
she must have been a much handsomer woman than in fact she was.
Her hair, not yet very gray, was becomingly arranged,
and her black gown was modish. I remembered having heard that
her sister, Mrs. MacAndrew, outliving her husband but a couple
of years, had left money to Mrs. Strickland; and by the look
of the house and the trim maid who opened the door I judged
that it was a sum adequate to keep the widow in modest comfort.
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