over the
dead. "But that isn't grief," he had said to them. "They're paid to do
that!" The Irish liked to splash about in their emotions ... they
wallowed in them....

But Mrs. Graham's grief was more than a summer shower. Henry knew
instinctively that Ninian's death had killed her. She might live for
many years, but she would be a dead woman. She would show very little,
nothing, to those who looked to see the signs of woe, but in her heart
she would hoard her desolation, keeping it to herself, obtruding her
sorrow on no one ... waiting patiently and silently for her day of
release, when, as her faith told her, she and her son would come
together again....

"It's unfair," he told himself, "to compare the grief of an illiterate
Irishwoman with the grief of an English lady!"

But then he had seen the grief of poor Englishwomen. Four of the
Boveyhayne men had been drowned in a naval battle. He had gone to the
memorial service in Boveyhayne Church, and had seen the friends of those
men mingling their tears ... but there had been none of this emotional
savagery, this howling like women in kraals, this medicine-man grief....

5

They were both in the drawing-room when he returned.

"I've written to Roger," he said, to explain his absence. "Perhaps," he
went on, "there are other letters you'd like me to write?"

"Yes," she said, "it would be kind of you, Henry!..."

There was Ninian's uncle, the Dean of Exebury, and Mr. Hare, with whom
he had worked ... they must be told at once ... and there were other
relatives, other friends. He spent the evening in doing the little
services that must be done when there is death, and found relief for his
mind in doing them.

"I told the servants," he said, looking up from a letter he was writing.
"Old Widger wanted to see you!..."

"Poor Widger," she said. "He and Ninian were so fond of each other!"

She got up and went to the door. "I must go and say something to him,"
she said. "He'll feel it so much!"

She closed the door behind her, and he sat staring at it after she had
gone. The matchless pride of her, that she could forget herself so
completely and think of the subordinate sorrow of her servant when she
might have been absorbed by her own!

He turned to Mary who was sitting near him, and reached out and took her
hand in his, but neither of them spoke.

What was there to say? Ninian was dead ... old men had made a war, and
this young man had paid for it ... and eve