was right: I am the kind to break early." Then,
because to think of herself in the midst of such sorrow seemed to her
almost wicked, she turned away from the mirror, and laid her
crape-trimmed hat on the shelf in the wardrobe. She was wearing a dress
of black Henrietta cloth, which had been borrowed from one of her
neighbours who had worn mourning, and the blouse and sleeves hung with
an exaggerated fullness over her thin arms and bosom. All that had
distinguished her beauty--the radiance, the colour the flower-like
delicacy of bloom and sweetness--these were blotted out by her grief and
by the voluminous mourning dress of the nineties. A week had changed
her, as even Harry's illness had not changed her, from a girl into a
woman; and horrible beyond belief, with the exception of her mother, it
had changed nothing else in the universe! The tragedy that had ruined
her life had left the rest of the world--even the little world of
Dinwiddie--moving as serenely, as indifferently, on its way towards
eternity. On the morning of the funeral she had heard the same market
wagons rumble over the cobblestones, the same droning songs of the
hucksters, the same casual procession of feet on the pavement. A
passionate indignation had seized her because life could be so brutal to
death, because the terror and the pity that flamed in her soul shed no
burning light on the town where her father had worked and loved and
fought and suffered and died. A little later the ceaseless tread of
visitors to the rectory door had driven this thought from her mind, but
through every minute, while he lay in the closed room downstairs, while
she sat beside her mother in the slow crawling carriage that went to the
old churchyard, while she stood with bowed head listening to the words
of the service--through it all there had been the feeling that something
must happen to alter a world in which such a thing had been possible,
that life must stop, that the heavens must fall, that God must put forth
His hand and work a miracle in order to show His compassion and His
horror.

But nothing had changed. After the funeral her mother had come home with
her, and the others, many with tear-stained faces, had drifted in
separate ways back to eat their separate dinners. For a few hours
Dinwiddie had been shaken out of its phlegmatic pursuit of happiness;
for a few hours it had attained an emotional solidarity which swept it
up from the innumerable bypaths of the person