o' tea ready yet? I can allus drink a cup o' tea after a layin'-out."

Sara had watched the two women drinking their tea with brooding eyes,
her small breast heaving with the intensity of her resentment. Without
being in any way able to define her emotions, she felt that there was
something horrible in their frank enjoyment of the steaming liquid,
gulped down to the cheerful accompaniment of a running stream of
intimate gossip, while all the time that quiet figure lay on the narrow
bed--motionless, silent, wrapped in the strange and immense aloofness of
the dead.

Presently one of the women poured out a third cup of tea and pushed
it towards the child, slopping in the thin, bluish-looking milk with a
generous hand.

"'Ave a cup, child. It's as good a drop o' tea as ever I tasted."

For a moment Sara stared at her speechlessly; then, with a sudden
passionate gesture, she swept the cup on to the floor.

The clash of breaking china seemed to ring through the chamber of death,
the women's voices rose shrilly in reproof, and Sara, fleeing into
the adjoining room, cast herself face downwards upon the floor,
horror-stricken. It was not the raucous anger of the women which she
heeded; that passed her by. But she had outraged some fine, instinctive
sense by reverence that lay deep within her own small soul.

Still she did not cry. Only, as she lay on the ground with her face
hidden, she kept repeating in a tense whisper--

"You know I didn't mean it, God! You know I didn't mean it!"

It was then that Patrick Lovell had appeared, coming in response to she
knew not what summons, and had taken her away with him. And the tendrils
of her affection, wrenched from their accustomed hold, had twined
themselves about this grey-haired, blue-eyed man, set so apart by every
_soigne_ detail of his person from the shabby, slip-shod world which
Sara had known, but who yet stood beside the bed on which her mother
lay, with a wrung mouth beneath his clipped moustache and a mist of
tears dimming his keen eyes.

Sara had loved him for those tears.

CHAPTER II

THE PASSING OF PATRICK LOVELL

Autumn had given place to winter, and a bitter northeast wind was
tearing through the pines, shrieking, as it fled, like the cry of a lost
soul. The eerie sound of it served in some indefinable way to emphasise
the cosy warmth and security of the room where Sara and her uncle were
sitting, their chairs drawn close up to the log fire which bur