Day after day she laboured, putting it in beautiful order, arranging Roger’s writing-table, their chair that was to be his special one, his favourite books, just where she felt sure he would like them to be; and while she was so employed she was almost happy. It seemed as though any moment he might come in.
Only when each day’s task was over, and she strove to concentrate her mind on reading or sewing, the thought of him in his bare prison room was almost more than she could endure, and slow, quiet tears would fall on the work or the page, while in her ears and in her aching heart echoed that haunting strain, last heard in Canterbury Cathedral on that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday after their marriage:
Hear my prayer, O Lord, incline thine ear:
Consider, O consider the voice of my complaint.
It seemed now to have been prophetic!
She never spoke to Roger of these her dark hours, nor he to her of his own; but they both knew. There was no need of words.
Rather, in those precious minutes when they were together, they recalled that brief interlude at St. Margaret’s, those “immortal hours” when little Miss Culpepper had hovered around them like a quaint, tutelary goddess.
“I’ve had another letter from Miss Culpepper,” Grace told him one day. “Full of flourishes as usual, dear old thing. She’s so upset at the idea that I haven’t even one maid that if I said half a word I believe she would come up herself and take charge of me!”
“I wish you would say the half word, darling,” Roger urged, not for the first time.
“I know; but I really can’t. Think of her here in London; it would be like pulling up a little old silver birch from a forest glade and sticking it in Shaftesbury Avenue!”