So it happened that when Hal came back to a dreary, empty, joyless London, an unexpected gladness was waiting for her.
The last few days had almost broken her spirit. The pathos of that lonely, far-off grave, in the little alien churchyard, where they tenderly left the remains of the beautiful, brilliant woman who had been so much in her life for so long, seemed more than she could bear.
They three had stood together, representing her richness in friendship, her poverty in blood ties. The wire to her mother had only brought the reply from some one in London that she was travelling in the South of Italy, and could not possibly arrive in time.
Alymer still seemed almost stunned. He had scarcely spoken since Danton told him what had happened. At first Hal had declined to see him at all, but in the end Denton, with his shrewd common sense, had talked her into a kindlier mood.
When they came back from the churchyard she had gone to him in the little sitting-room, where he sat alone, with bowed head. He stood up when she came in, but he did not speak. He waited for her to say what she would, with a look of quiet misery in his eyes that touched her heart.
For the first time she saw how changed he was. There seemed nothing of the old boyishness left. Only a quiet, grave, deeply suffering man.
She had no conception that she, personally, added every hour and every moment to that suffering. She did not know he was enduring a bitter sense of having lost her for ever, as well as the friend and benefactress he had undoubtedly loved very dearly, if not with the same passionate love that she had known for him.
But he only stood before her there, very straight and very still, and with that old, quiet, ineradicable dignity which never failed him.
“Lorraine left a little written message for me,” she said to him.
She paused a moment, and her eyes wandered away out to the little garden, with its last fading summer beauty yielding already to autumn. And so she did not see the expression in his fine face when he ventured to look at her. She did not know that because of his hopeless love, and withal his quiet courage and quiet pain, at that moment he looked even more splendidly a man than perhaps he had ever done before.