"Yes, sure, an' that is so, but I do not think, seeing you, ma'am, that she will do that," said Diarmid earnestly, and he held open the door for her to pass in as if she had been a queen.
They trod the narrow stairs very softly. On the half-landing Diarmid paused and stood aside while he pointed with finger that trembled slightly to the closed door of the room where Mackinnon slept his last sleep.
Vivien braced herself, for the thing she was about to do was not only unusual, but might very easily be misconstrued. She took a little quick breath as her fingers closed upon the handle of the door. The next moment she turned it, slipped in, and closed it behind her again.
The blinds of the front window only were down, but the sun, now veering westward, shone in at the window in the gable-end and lay in a soft yellow flood upon the quiet room. A shaft of sunshine even lay athwart the bed, touching as it passed Isla's motionless figure, where she sat upon a chair by the bed-side, her hands lightly clasped on her lap, her eyes staring straight in front of her, unseeing, uncomprehending, a look of almost hopeless misery upon her face. At sight of a strange woman in the doorway, however, she sprang up, quivering with indignation. She would have pointed to the door, to which she tried to hasten, but something in Vivien's beautiful face--some unimagined quality of rarest sympathy deterred her. She stopped with the very words of dismissal frozen on her lips.
Vivien approached quickly, laid a tender hand on her shrinking shoulder and spoke.
"My dear, my dear! I am Vivien Rosmead, I too have suffered. Come out into the sunshine and let us talk. If even we do not talk we can cry together, and that will help us both."
Isla was powerless to be angry. Her brief indignation at the intrusion of a stranger upon her most sacred privacy passed as a tale that is told.
"It is very kind of you, but--but--I hardly know you, and there is nothing to be said or done. Everything is over--that is all."
"I too have thought so, dear," said Vivien softly. "Come, my poor darling. He does not need you any more. Come, and let us talk and think of those who do."
Isla suffered herself to be led away.