“Just after—everything—has been taken away,” Mrs. Latimer said now; “the house seems so empty. Faith,” tremulously, “even Faith can’t help you not to feel that everything has gone—such a long, long way off.”
She did not wipe away the tear that fell on her cheek. She looked very small and meek in her deep mourning. She presented to Miss Amory’s imagination the figure of a lovable child grown old without having lost its child temperament.
“But I must not complain,” she went on, with an effort to smile at Miss Amory’s ugly old intelligently sympathetic countenance. “It must have been all over in a second, and he could have felt no pain at all. Death by accident is always an awful shock to those left behind; but it must scarcely be like death to—those who go. He was quite well; he had just bought the pistol and took it out to show to Mr. Baird. Mr. Baird himself did not understand how it happened.”
“It is nearly always so—that no one quite sees how it is done,” Miss Amory answered. “Do not let yourself think of it.”
She was sitting quite near to Mrs. Latimer, and she leaned forward and put her hand over the cold, little, shrivelled one lying on the lap of the mourning-dress.
“Though it was so sudden,” she said, “it was an end not unlike Margery’s—the slipping out of life without realising that the last hour had come.”
“Yes; I have thought that, too.”
She looked up at the portrait on the wall—the portrait of the bright girl-face. Her own face lighted into a smile.
“It is so strange to think that they are together again,” she said. “They will have so much to tell each other.”
“Yes,” said Miss Amory; “yes.”