“Send me a wire,” he said.
The Colonel thrust his head out of the window.
“You’re not coming?”
“No.” The young man gave an expressive glance in the direction of Mrs Lawless, seated in the far corner of the carriage with the fragrant drooping flowers in her lap. “Grit wouldn’t thank us for making a picnic, or a funeral party, of it with her there,” he said.
Colonel Grey understood.
“I’ll let you know immediately,” he promised, and sank back on the cushions, taking off his hat and mopping his much perplexed and perspiring brow as the train moved slowly out.
He looked across at Mrs Lawless. She was gazing out of the window at the sunny country as it swept past her view with eyes that saw nothing consciously, and with thoughts, he rightly conjectured, far away from her surroundings. He tried to think of her in this new connection that she had sprung on him so suddenly and for which he had been so wholly unprepared; tried, but failed to remember, what Lawless had said in respect of his relationship with her that had so entirely misled him. He recalled that he had asked point blank whether he was a connection of hers, recalled too the ambiguous answer to his question: “By marriage only.” Truly a man may usually be said to be related to his wife by marriage only. But the answer had been given with intent to deceive. And Lawless had said other things that had tended to turn his mind from any such suspicion. For private reasons he had desired to conceal the fact of his marriage.
It was long before Mrs Lawless turned her face in his direction; when she did he saw that her eyes were filled with a great hopelessness, and something that resembled dread. Unconsciously she fingered the roses in her lap, touching them with a nervous caressing hand.
“I am afraid,” she said, and looked at him wistfully. “I have never imagined anything like this... I thought I was going Home without ever seeing his face again. I had reconciled myself to that. And now... It ought not to be more difficult to part from the dead than to part irrevocably from the living. But it is.”
She looked down suddenly at the roses, and lifted them gently, and laid them against her face.