'Why is he here?' he asked, with a curtness in his easy voice which Rachel had never heard from him before.
'Why—' she began hesitatingly, and then added vaguely, 'It seemed best.'
'Best for him?' responded David with the same curtness.
Then he turned and dropped his head slowly over the figure in the coffin, and Rachel slipped away. David's manner seemed to put her entirely outside of the occasion.
Later he joined her where she waited in the dim parlor. The still chilliness of the room was stiffening and depressing, but she had not made a fire because its open cheerfulness would not have seemed appropriate. David walked up and down the long room a few minutes in a silence which Rachel, not knowing his mood, did not break.
Then he said, as abruptly as before, 'Can you have him moved in the morning?'
'Moved?—Where?'
Rachel had not supposed that her brother-in-law would have the same feeling of incongruity that she had.
'Anywhere but there. Here—I don't know—there is no place in the house that seems to belong to him. The hall might do—at least he went through there every day,' he finished with an irony none too subtle.
He began to walk up and down the length of the room, alternately facing her with a challenging air, and turning abruptly away again when he had neared her seat. But Rachel, absorbed still in her mood, was unappreciative of his manner.