"The Hannigan aunts are arriving to-night, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary. I think perhaps it's easier, when there are people there," Sylvia whispered.
Lily was glad to think that they would have the occupation of preparing for, and receiving, the visitors. Anything would surely be better than sitting, sick with crying, repeating over and over again all that they had said already.
She felt very tired, and full of remorse for her own inadequacy. She knew that there had been no conviction behind any of the commonplace utterances with which she had striven to convey consolation. Only her sympathy with their sorrow had been real. Even sympathy, however, seemed to fail her when Philip Stellenthorpe spoke of personal loss to himself.
"Our very nearest friend, poor Charlie," he observed sorrowfully. "There are very few left now, my little Lily, whom I know as I did your poor Cousin Charlie. We'd been friends for many years and I thought very highly of him—very highly indeed."
Lily, against her own will, knew that during Cousin Charlie's life-time Philip had not thought highly of him at all. They had not been intimate friends—Philip had no intimate friends—and it was Charlie Hardinge, not Philip, who had taken for granted that a good-fellowship, at all events, existed between them. Philip had very often resented Charlie's officious interest in his affairs, and his reiterations of unwanted advice.
"Well," said Philip with a heavy sigh, "our loss is his gain, poor fellow, no doubt."
Then he, too, believed, or affected to believe, that Cousin Charlie was now in a region of undimmed happiness, a disincarnate spirit in the presence of his Creator.
Lily deliberately tried to imagine the operation of such a transformation.
Cousin Charlie, interested in his garden, in the arrival in India of a little granddaughter, in the successful solution of a chess problem, utterly without premonition, so far as one knew, of any kind. Walking upstairs, perhaps thinking quite casually of the little pain in his side that they all knew was nothing at all, perhaps occupied with some trivial reflection about the lamp in the passage. He was always particular about the trimming of the wicks....
And then in one instant, unconsciousness. They had found him on the very threshold of the dressing-room, where he must have fallen just as he entered it.