.

"And don't you think she looks nice?"

"Yes."

He went out of the house soon after. And all the time he seemed to be
creeping aside to avoid it.

Paul went about from place to place, doing the business of the death. He
met Clara in Nottingham, and they had tea together in a cafe, when they
were quite jolly again. She was infinitely relieved to find he did not
take it tragically.

Later, when the relatives began to come for the funeral, the affair
became public, and the children became social beings. They put
themselves aside. They buried her in a furious storm of rain and wind.
The wet clay glistened, all the white flowers were soaked. Annie
gripped his arm and leaned forward. Down below she saw a dark corner
of William's coffin. The oak box sank steadily. She was gone. The
rain poured in the grave. The procession of black, with its umbrellas
glistening, turned away. The cemetery was deserted under the drenching
cold rain.

Paul went home and busied himself supplying the guests with drinks.
His father sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Morel's relatives, "superior"
people, and wept, and said what a good lass she'd been, and how he'd
tried to do everything he could for her--everything. He had striven
all his life to do what he could for her, and he'd nothing to reproach
himself with. She was gone, but he'd done his best for her. He wiped his
eyes with his white handkerchief. He'd nothing to reproach himself for,
he repeated. All his life he'd done his best for her.

And that was how he tried to dismiss her. He never thought of her
personally. Everything deep in him he denied. Paul hated his father
for sitting sentimentalising over her. He knew he would do it in
the public-houses. For the real tragedy went on in Morel in spite of
himself. Sometimes, later, he came down from his afternoon sleep, white
and cowering.

"I HAVE been dreaming of thy mother," he said in a small voice.

"Have you, father? When I dream of her it's always just as she was when
she was well. I dream of her often, but it seems quite nice and natural,
as if nothing had altered."

But Morel crouched in front of the fire in terror.

The weeks passed half-real, not much pain, not much of anything, perhaps
a little relief, mostly a _nuit blanche_. Paul went restless from place
to place. For some months, since his mother had been worse, he had not
made love to Clara. She was, as it were, dumb to him, rather distant.
Dawes saw her very occasional