"She was very beautiful," said Roger. He thought, as he said it, that it was a strange thing for an Englishman to say to a dead woman's brother. "She was very beautiful. It must be terrible to you. You knew her in an intimate relation."
"Yes," said Leslie, looking hard at Roger, out of grave level eyes. "She was a very perfect character."
They were climbing the cliff road to the cottage. The sea was just below them. The water was ruffled to whiteness. Sullivan's jobble stretched in breakers across the bay from Cam Point. Gannets, plunging in the jobble, flung aloft white founts, as though shot were striking.
"You were very great friends," said Roger. "I mean, even for brother and sister."
"Johnny was her favourite brother, as a child," said Leslie. "You did not see much of Johnny. He was killed in the war. And then he was in India a long time. It was after Johnny's death that Ottalie and I began to be so much to each other. You see, Agatha was only with her about five months in the year. She was with us nearly that each year. She was wonderful with children."
"Yes," said Roger, holding open the gate of the little garden so that his guest might pass, "I know." He was not likely to forget how wonderful she had been with children. They went into the little sitting-room where Norah, in one of her black moods, gave them tea. After tea they sat in the garden, looking out over the low hedge at the bay. At sunset they walked along the coast to a place which they had called "the cove." They had used to bathe there. A little brook tumbled over a rock in a forty-foot fall. Below the fall was a pool, overgrown later in the year with meadow-sweet and honeysuckle, but clear now, save for the rushes and brambles. The brook slid out from the basin over a reddish rock worn smooth, even in its veins and knuckles, by many centuries of trickling. Storms had piled shingle below this side of water. The brook dribbled to the sea unseen, making a gurgling, tinkling noise. Up above, at the place where the fall first leapt, among some ash-trees, windy and grey, stood what was left of a nunnery, of reddish stone, fire-blackened, among a company of tumbled gravestones.
Of all the places sacred to Ottalie in Roger's mind, that was the most sacred. They had been happy there. They had talked intimately there, moved by the place's beauty. His most vivid memories of her had that beautiful place for their setting.
"Roger," said Leslie, "did you see her in town, before this happened?"
"No."
"You did not see her?"