r. Dulce's
sobs did not rouse her. She showed no symptom of emotion when Sir
Christopher bent his white head in inexplicable woe over the form of the
man who had been dear to him as his own soul. As she knelt beside the
corpse, she moved now and then, and her breath came and went softly,
regularly, but her eyes never departed from the face before her, with
its closed eyes and sad, solemn smile. Perhaps, in her strange musings,
she was trying to follow him in spirit to where he had

"Gone before,
To that unknown and silent shore"

so dimly dreamt of here, because her eyes are gleaming large and clear,
and almost unearthly in their brilliance.

At first, though somewhat in awe of her, they had sought by tenderest
means to draw her from the room. But she had resisted, or rather been
utterly deaf to all entreaties, and, kneeling by the bed that held all
that she had loved or ever could love, still fed her eager gaze with
sight of him, and pressed from time to time his ice-cold hand to her
cheeks, her lips, her eyes.

Then Sir Mark had admonished them to let her be, and sinking into a
chair, with a heavy sigh, had kept her vigil with her. Tall candles
gleamed on distant tables. The night wind sighed without; footsteps came
and went, and heart-broken sighs and ill-suppressed sobs disturbed the
air. The little child he had loved--the poor Boodie--would not be
forbidden, and, creeping into the sad room, had stolen to the bedside,
and had laid upon his breast a little pallid blossom she had, secretly
and alone, braved all the terrors of the dark night to gain, having
traversed the quiet garden to pluck it from the tiny plot out there she
called her own.

She had not been frightened when she saw him, but had stood gazing in
some wonder at the indescribably pathetic smile that glorified his lips,
after which she had given her hand obediently to Dicky Browne, and had
gone back with him to her nursery, content, and far less sad than when
she came.

Sometimes they all came and gazed on him together; Julia trembling, but
subdued; Dulce with her hand in Roger's; the old man inconsolable. Now
Dicky Browne whispers feeble but well-meant words of comfort to him, now
Sir Mark touches his arm in silent sympathy. But they all keep somewhat
apart from Portia; she has grown suddenly sacred in their eyes, as one
to whom the beloved dead more especially belongs.

One of them, Sir Mark, I believe,