ned still for nearly half an hour. She wept, with
a strange mixture of feelings; partly out of a poignant sense of the
fictitiousness of all these observances by which people were supposed to
show "respect" to the dead, and partly out of a real aching of the heart
and miserable sense that even now, that certainly by and by, the man who
had been so all-important a little while ago would be as if he had not
been. She wept for him, and yet at the same time wept because she could
not weep more for him, because the place which knew him had already begun
to know him no more, and because of the sham affliction with which they
were all supplementing the true. It was she who shed the truest tears,
but it was she also who rebelled most at the make-believe which convention
forced upon her; and the usual sense of hopeless exasperation was strong
in her mind. After a while she threw off the shawl from her feet and the
cushions that supported her shoulders, and got up and walked about the
room, looking out upon the afternoon sunshine and the trees that were
turning their shadows to the east. How she longed, with a fervour scarcely
explainable, not at all comprehensible to most people, to leave the
place, to open her wings in a large atmosphere, to get free!

At half-past four o'clock Minnie and Chatty went down to tea. They were
to the minute, and their mother heard them with a half smile. It was
always time enough for her to smooth her hair and her collar, and take a
new handkerchief from her drawer, when she heard the sisters close their
door. She went downstairs after them, in her gown covered with crape,
with her snowy cap, which gave dignity to her appearance. Her widow's
dress was very becoming to her, as it is to so many people. She had a
pretty complexion, pure red and white, though the colour was perhaps a
little broken, and not so smooth as a girl's; and her eyes were brown
and bright. Notwithstanding the weeks of watching she had gone through,
the strain of everything that had passed, she made little show of her
trouble. Her eye was not dim, nor her natural force abated. The girls
were dull in complexion and aspect, but their mother was not so. As she
came into the room there came with her a brightness, a sense of living,
which was inappropriate to the hour and the place.

"Where is Theo?" she asked.

"He is coming in presently; at least, I called to him as he went out,
and told him tea was ready, and he said he would be