‘He seems to think,’ said Diva to Mrs Bartlett, as they met on shopping errands one morning, ‘that now he has got a motor nobody else may use the road at all.’

‘A trumpery little car,’ said Mrs Bartlett, ‘I should have thought, with ten thousand pounds as good as in his pocket, he might have got himself something better.’

They were standing at the corner looking up towards Mallards, and Diva suddenly caught sight of a board on Major Benjy’s house, announcing that it was for sale.

‘Why, whatever’s that?’ she cried. ‘That must have been put up only today. Good morning, Mr Georgie. What about Major Benjy’s house?’

Georgie still wore a broad black band on his sleeve.

‘Yes, he told me yesterday that he was going to move into Mallards next week,’ he said. ‘And he’s going to have a sale of his furniture almost immediately.’

‘That won’t be much to write home about,’ said Diva scornfully. ‘A few moth-eaten tiger-skins which he said he shot in India.’

‘I think he wants some money,’ said Georgie. ‘He’s bought a motor, you see, and he has to keep up Mallards as well as his own house.’

‘I call that very rash,’ said Mrs Bartlett. ‘I call that counting your chickens before they’re hatched. Oh dear me, what a thing to have said! Dreadful!’

Georgie tactfully covered this up by a change of subject.

‘I’ve made up my mind,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to put up a cenotaph in the churchyard to dear Lucia and Elizabeth.’

‘What? Both?’ asked Diva.

‘Yes, I’ve thought it carefully over, and it’s going to be both.’

‘Major Benjy ought to go halves with you then,’ said Diva.

‘Well, I told him I was intending to do it,’ said Georgie, ‘and he didn’t catch on. He only said “Capital idea,” and took some whisky and soda. So I shan’t say any more. I would really just as soon do it all myself.’

‘Well, I do think that’s mean of him,’ said Diva. ‘He ought anyhow to bear some part of the expense, considering everything. Instead of which he buys a motor car which he can’t drive. Go on about the cenotaph.’

‘I saw it down at the stonemason’s yard,’ said Georgie, ‘and that put the idea into my head. Beautiful white marble on the lines, though of course much smaller, of the one in London. It had been ordered, I found, as a tombstone, but then the man who ordered it went bankrupt, and it was on the stonemason’s hands.’

‘I’ve heard about it,’ said Mrs Bartlett, in rather a superior voice. ‘Kenneth told me you’d told him, and we both think that it’s a lovely idea.’

‘The stonemason ought to let you have it cheap then,’ said Diva.

‘It wasn’t very cheap,’ said Georgie, ‘but I’ve bought it, and they’ll put it in its place today, just outside the south transept, and the Padre is going to dedicate it. Then there’s the inscription. I shall have in loving memory of them, by me, and a bit of the Padre’s text at the memorial service. Just “In death they were not divided.”’