Mrs. Nugent had thought it better to stay indoors and dispatch her
husband to the scene of the first cricket match of the season, a
couple of miles away.

At about five o'clock she made herself a cup of tea, and did not wake
up from the sleep which followed until the evening was closing in. She
awoke with a start, remembering that she had intended to give a good
look between the spare bedroom that had been her daughter's, and
possibly make a change or two of the furniture. There was a mahogany
wardrobe ... and so forth.

She had not entered this room very often since the death. It had come
to resemble to her mind a sort of melancholy sanctuary, symbolical of
glories that might have been; for she and her husband were full of the
glorious day that had begun to dawn when Laurie, very constrained
though very ardent, had called upon them in state to disclose his
intentions. Well, it had been a false dawn; but at least it could be,
and was, still talked about in sad and suggestive whispers.

It seemed full then of a mysterious splendor when she entered it this
evening, candle in hand, and stood regarding it from the threshold. To
the outward eye it was nothing very startling. A shrouded bed
protruded from the wall opposite with the words "The Lord preserve
thee from all evil" illuminated in pink and gold by the girl's own
hand. An oleograph of Queen Victoria in coronation robes hung on one
side and the painted photograph of a Nonconformist divine, Bible in
hand, whiskered and cravatted, upon the other. There was a small
cloth-covered table at the foot of the bed, adorned with an almost
continuous line of brass-headed nails as a kind of beading round the
edge, in the center of which rested the plaster image of a young
person clasping a cross. A hymn-book and a Bible stood before this,
and a small jar of wilted flowers. Against the opposite wall, flanked
by dejected-looking wedding-groups, and another text or two, stood the
great mahogany wardrobe, whose removal was vaguely in contemplation.

Mrs. Nugent regarded the whole with a tender kind of severity, shaking
her head slowly from side to side, with the tin candlestick slightly
tilted. She was a full-bodied lady, in clothes rather too tight for
her, and she panted a little after the ascent of the stairs. It seemed
to her once more a strangely and inexplicably perverse act of
Providence, to whom she had always paid deference, by which so
incalculable a rise in the social s