The boy trailed into his room, disconsolate and frightened-looking.
Owen Quentillian, searching for writing materials, found them on the table in the Canon’s study, a table scrupulous in its orderliness, each stack of papers docketed, each article laid with symmetrical precision in its own place.
Owen would not sit there, where only the Canon had sat, under the crucifix mounted on the green velvet plaque. He went instead to another, smaller table, in the embrasure of a window, and sat there writing until the morning light streamed in upon him.
Then he laid down the pen, with a sense of the futility of activities that sought to cheat reflection, and let his mind dwell upon that which subconsciously obsessed it.
Canon Morchard had died as he had lived—an optimist. An invincible faith in the ultimate rightness of all things had been his to the end, and perhaps most of all at the end.
Quentillian envisaged the Canon’s causes of thankfulness.
He had seen his children as “safe” and “happy.” Was it only because he had wanted so to see them?
David, who was dead, had been mourned for, but the Canon had been spared the deepest bitterness of separation. He had known nothing of the gulf widening between his own soul and that of his eldest son....
A fool’s paradise?
He had seen Lucilla as safe and happy.