What was left to her?
Her heart was suddenly empty of love, of hatred, of triumph, of defeat. She was tired and lonely. Somewhere, dimly, from the passage, the cuckoo-clock proclaimed the hour.
The house! That at least was left to her. These rooms, these roofs, the garden, the village, the fields, the hedges the roads to the sea. The Place had not deceived her, had not shared in the victory over her; it had, rather, shared in her defeat.
It seemed, as she stood there, to come up to her, to welcome her, to console her.
She put a shawl over her shoulders, went softly through the dark passages, down into the drawing-room.
There, feeling her way, she found candles and lit them. She went to her cabinet, opened drawers, produced papers, plans, rows of figures. Here was a plan of a new barn behind the house, here the addition of a conservatory to the drawing-room. Before her was a map of South Glebeshire, with the roads, the fields, the farms. She began to work, adding figures, following the plans, writing....
The light of the summer morning found her working there in the thin candle-light.
CHAPTER VI
THE CEREMONY
At about half-past four upon the afternoon of November 8th, 1903, the drawing-room of No. 5 Rundle Square Westminster, was empty. November 8th was, of course, Grandfather Trenchard’s birthday; a year ago on that day Philip Mark had made his first entrance into the Trenchard fastnesses. This Eighth of November, 1903, did not, in the manner of weather, repeat the Eighth of November, 1902. There had been, a year ago, the thickest of fogs, now there was a clear, mildly blue November evening, with the lamps like faint blurs of light against a sky in which tiny stars sparkled on a background that was almost white. It was cold enough to be jolly, and there was a thin wafer-like frost over the pools and gutters.