“It seems a shame so beautiful a place should ‘waste its sweetness on the desert air,’” she said, half-laughingly, half-earnestly. “But we know you will not leave it as it is,” she went on, in a low voice, to Hugh, as they followed the inwardly-elated housekeeper out of the room. “You see, Ralph is getting to be a young man, and should meet people. We have thought you would come to see this in its right light before very long.”
As Mrs. Mervyn was saying these words, they were passing through the hall, and Mrs. Gray, in her exuberance of spirits at the prospect of liveliness to come, went up to the gong and sounded the summons to luncheon in quite a joyous fashion.
Hugh, following Mrs. Mervyn into the dining-room, was struck by the bare and empty appearance of the room, but he was still more impressed by something else. This was Lilia’s portrait in pastel, which he had had painted by a celebrated French artist after her death, to be hung over the mantelshelf where Roderick Pym’s portrait in oils used to hang. This portrait, which had been somewhat of an abstraction, a study in grey and lilac, had lost whatever life the artist had put into it.
“It might be a portrait of her ghost,” he thought, with an eerie feeling.
In truth, as he sat at luncheon, and afterwards, when he and Ralph laid the wreaths on the grave, there was no longer that old sensation of her presence lingering about the place. It was all empty as a husk.
“The old life has gone for ever,” he thought. To make the Pinewood bearable, he felt he must live a new life.
They took tea at the Rectory with the Mervyns.
As he was strolling in the garden with his hostess afterwards, he said to her, suddenly:
“If I should invite people here later on, would you consent to be hostess for a time?”
Mrs. Mervyn was slightly startled, but acquiesced. After the father and son had left, she broached the matter to her husband.