"Not at all. We've no right there—not the right of the most distant cousin twenty times removed. Mother was his mistress, and she daren't use the word 'husband' even to us, though I've seen her mouth itching to do it. 'Tis always 'your dear father.' She can't put on a widow's streamers, though it's in her heart to. She'll have to balance her black pretty cautious, I can tell you, if she don't want the people to be staring."
"Surely it must all come out if he leaves his money to us."
"He'll do it clever," said Cora bitterly. "With all his faults he was clever enough. He didn't hide this—so clever as a lapwing hides her nest—for near thirty years, to let it come out the minute he was dead."
"If I was engaged to be married, like what you are, I shouldn't be so nervous," said Phyllis.
"As to that, 'twas as well for me that it fell out now and not later. It may mean a bigger establishment after all; and even a bigger wedding, if I put it off till spring."
"My word, what'll Ned say?"
But Ned's view did not enter as a serious factor into Cora's.
"He's all right," she answered. "If I'm content, so's he."
Storm heralded the funeral day, and dawn blinked red-eyed from much weeping. It was hoped that further torrents might hold off until after the ceremony, and happily they did so, though intermittent rain fell and the wind stormed roughly out of a sad-coloured south.
"'Blessed be the carpse that the rain rains on,'" said Joe Voysey in muffled accents to Jack Head.