A few prayers were said, and a hymn sung, and then she was left to lie there alone. Shafts of sunlight would slant across the stones, and fading, give place to twilight, then to dusk, then to darkness. The church would be very still. Dawn would come, with the sweet twittering of birds, and the sun would once more strike through the armorial glass of the East window, and paint stone and timber with bright colour; and still she would be lying there, dead to the glory of a new day as she had been dead to the darkness of the night. Nothing would matter to her any more. In a little while her dust would mingle with that of long generations of Clintons forgotten, and her memory would pass away as theirs had passed. Her life had been everything to her, her wants and hopes and regrets the centre of her being. Now it was as if it had never been—for her, lying in the still church.
But her acts lived. The ripples she had caused in the pond of life would spread, intersecting other ripples caused by other acts, until they reached the border.
When they had returned to the house Nancy went up with Joan into her room—the room in which they had slept side by side for all but a few nights in their lives until Nancy's marriage. There was only one bed in the room now.
"How odd it looks!" said Nancy. "Do you miss me, my precious old Joan?"
"Of course I do," said Joan. "I had to make them take your bed out. It made me feel so horribly lonely."
"If John is ever unkind to me," said Nancy, "I shall come here and have it put back."
She checked herself. No vestige of a joke was to be allowed until after to-morrow. She thought herself unfeeling for even inclining to light speech. To her and Joan the death of someone not much older than themselves was a startling thing; and the death of anyone so close to them, in their inexperience of death, would have subdued them for a time.
"Let's go and talk in the schoolroom," Nancy said. "Nobody will come there."
They sat together on the old comfortable sofa, arms entwined. The absence of sentiment with which they had been accustomed to treat one another had given place to frequent signs of affection. They had hardly been more together during their childhood than since Nancy had come to Kencote after her honeymoon the day before. Their stream of talk flowed unceasingly. Oceans of separate experience had to be bridged.
Now they put aside for a time their own affairs of the past and future, and talked about the immediate present.