ardly capable of realising her mistress's
death.

It was she who, while they were away, had done her best to throw a little
air of comfort over the forsaken _salon_. She had kindled the fire,
watered the plants, and thrown open the windows to the sunshine, finding
in her toil and movement some little relief from her own heart-ache and
oppression. When Paul came back, and with numb, trembling fingers had
stripped himself of his scarf and his great-coat, he stepped over the
threshold into the _salon_, and it seemed to him as though the sunlight
and the open windows and the crackling blaze of the fire dealt him a
sudden blow. He walked up to the windows, and, shuddering, drew them down
and closed the blinds, Felicie watching him anxiously from the landing
through the half-open door. Then he had thrown himself into a chair; and
Kendal, coming softly upstairs after him, had gently closed the door from
the outside, said a kind word to Felicie, and himself slipped noiselessly
down again and out into the Champs Elysees. There he had paced up and
down for an hour or more under the trees, from which a few frosty leaves
were still hanging in the December air.

He himself had been so stunned and bewildered by the loss which had
fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors
again, he was for a while scarcely able to think consecutively about it.
He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but a sort of dumb
physical congeniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the
sky, in the cheerful distinctness and sharpness of every outline. And
then, little by little, the cheated grief reasserted itself, the numbed
senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the
past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men
hold those good things whereon, so long as they are still their own, they
are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy. A week before,
his sister's affection had been to him the one sufficient screen between
his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought
and of existence. The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be
rushing in upon him. And still, life had to be lived, work to be got
through, duties to be faced. How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering.
How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and
possession after possession swept away, and still find the years
tolerable and th