"And that will mean some of the little time we have left will be taken away from us."
"You could come up to town with me and we could have lunch somewhere," he suggested.
Yes, they could have lunch together, and then a week or two later he would be gone.
"Richard!"
He looked round in astonishment at the poignant exclamation of his name.
"No, I did not want to say anything," she told him with a sad smile. "Nothing more than 'Richard,' while you can still look round at me like that, while you are still here to look round at me."
The fine autumn weather lasted until Richard left for South Africa. His mother at his earnestly expressed desire did not go to Southampton to wave the last farewell. When he was trying to dissuade her from the journey, she felt as she used to feel when as a boy he had always tried to dissuade her from coming to Paddington to bid him good-by on the platform before he went back to Eton. They parted on the steps of Woodworth Lodge, and the carriage drove off with ghostly quietude along the road that was littered with dead leaves, drove off with her Richard in the yellow light of an October morning.
"Seems strange without him," said Jemmie, taking his wife's arm affectionately and guiding her when she stumbled on the stairs because the tears in her eyes obscured all objects familiar and unfamiliar, all life indeed for the moment.
"Geoffrey's off to Oxford to-morrow, and then you and I shall be all alone, old lady, just as we used to be when we were first married twenty years ago."
Jemmie was evidently anxious to free his mind of the emotional discomfort that Richard's departure provoked by directing his emotion into the channels of a sentimentalized past; but Mary refused to follow his lead. She had only one idea, which was to be alone with her grief. She had no superfluity of idle regret, no lachrymatories of stale tears to be unsealed for Jemmie's gratification. She was inconsolable.