Twenty-two
IThere was nothing more for me to do at Gipsy’s Acre. I left Greta in chargeof the house while I sailed to New York to wind up things there and to takepart in what I felt with some dread¹ were going to be the most ghastly gold-plated obsequies for Ellie.
“You’re going into the jungle,” Greta warned me. “Look after yourself.
Don’t let them skin you alive.”
She was right about that. It was the jungle. I felt it when I got there. Ididn’t know about jungles—not that kind of jungle. I was out of my depthand I knew it. I wasn’t the hunter, I was the hunted. There were people allround me in the undergrowth, gunning for me. Sometimes, I expect, I ima-gined things. Sometimes my suspicions were justified². I remember goingto the lawyer supplied for me by Mr. Lippincott (a most urbane³ man whotreated me rather as a general practitioner⁴ might have done in the med-ical profession). I had been advised to get rid of certain mining propertiesto which the title deeds were not too clear.
He asked me who had told me so and I said it was Stanford Lloyd.
“Well, we must look into it,” he said. “A man like Mr. Lloyd ought toknow.”
He said to me afterwards:
“There’s nothing wrong with your title deeds, and there is certainly nopoint in your selling the land in a hurry, as he seems to have advised you.
Hang on to it.”
I had the feeling then that I’d been right, everybody was gunning for me.
They all knew I was a simpleton when it came to finance.
The funeral was splendid and, I thought, quite horrible. Gold-plated, as Ihad surmised⁵. At the cemetery⁶, masses of flowers, the cemetery itself likea public park and all the trimmings of wealthy mourning expressed in mo-numental marble. Ellie would have hated it, I was sure of that. But I sup-pose her family had a certain right to her.
Four days after my arrival in New York I had news from KingstonBishop.
The body of old Mrs. Lee had been found in the disused

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