nation, perhaps despair. She ought to be beyond all feeling for
what was to come. Yet she was not so. On the contrary, new ideas, new
plans, had welled up into her mind,--how many, how few hours after she
had laid down the charge, in which outwardly she had been so faithful,
but inwardly so full of shortcomings? These plans filled her mind now as
she went by her son's side through the mossy paths where, even in the
height of summer, it was always a little cold. She could not speak of
them, feeling a horror of herself, an ashamed sense that to betray the
revulsion of her thoughts to her boy would be to put her down from her
position in his respect for ever. Between these mutual reluctances to
betray what was really in them the two went along very silently, as if
they were counting their steps, their heads a little bowed down, the
sound of their feet making far more commotion than was necessary in the
stillness of the place. To be out-of-doors was something for both of
them. They could breathe more freely, and if they could not talk could
at least think, without the sense that they were impairing the natural
homage of all things to the recently dead.

"Take care, Theo," she said, after a long interval of silence. "It is
very damp here."

"Yes, there is a good deal of timber that ought to go." He caught his
breath when he had said this, and she gave a slight shiver. They both
would have spoken quite freely had the father been alive. "The house is
damp, too," said he, taking courage.

"In winter, perhaps, a little, when there is much rain."

And then there was a long pause. When they came within sight of the
pond, which glistened under the moonlight, reflecting all the trees in
irregular masses, and showing here and there a big white water-lily bud
couched upon a dark bank of leaves, he spoke again: "I don't think it
can be very healthy, either, to have the pond so near the house."

"You have always had your health, all of you," she said.

"That is true; but not very much of it. We are a subdued sort of family,
mother."

"That is because the Warrenders----" She stopped here, feeling the
inappropriateness of what she was about to say. It very often happens
that a wife has but little opinion of the race to which her husband
belongs. She attributes the defects of her own children to that side
instinctively. "It is character," she said, "not health."

"But all the same, if we had a little more air and a little less
sha