"Can't he die at the hotel--to-night or to-morrow?" said Merriam.
"Then what becomes of you?" asked Rockwell.
"You can't. You're dead! And how can Senator Norman die at the hotel when we should not be able to produce his body there?"
"We could get the body," said Mr. Wayward, speaking in a lowered tone. "As Mr. Merriam's friends we would take his body away from the hospital to be buried and bring it to the hotel."
"We shall have to send for the real Merriam's friends," said Rockwell. "From Riceville and--wherever your people live." He looked at Merriam. "We should have no body to show them. We could bury a loaded casket. But why should we, who must be strangers to him from their point of view, have been in such a hurry when they could get here in a few hours? Probably they would want to take his body elsewhere for burial. Very likely they would have the coffin we had buried raised and opened. And how could we get a dead body into the Hotel De Soto? Up a fire escape?"
In the earnestness of his argument Rockwell evidently did not realise the gruesomeness of his language.
"No!" she said. "I will not have George's body smuggled about the city."
She paused, looking strangely at Merriam. None of the others, not even Rockwell, ventured to speak.
"Alicia told me, I believe, that you have no near relatives?" she said presently.
"None nearer than cousins," Merriam replied.
For a long minute more Aunt Mary stared at him. She closed her eyes, opened them, and looked again. Then her lips shut tight for a moment in an expression of momentous decision. She leaned forward.
"You have the Norman blood in you," she said to Merriam, "on your mother's side. You are fine stuff. We have all seen that. We will make a Norman of you, if you will. You shall take George's place--to save his name!"
"It's absolutely the only way," he cried. "The only other alternative is to let the whole story come out."
"Then that's what we have to do," said Mr. Wayward. "Make a clean breast of it."
"No!" echoed Rockwell. "Think what that means--to George's memory, first of all. That in his last hours his relatives and friends were conspiring against him, with the help of a stranger double, to force him to abandon the kind of life he was leading and the disreputable interests with which he was associated.--I beg your pardon, Mr. Crockett!"