This time it was Peter.
He looked very tired.
"I thought you would come," Jan said. "She died at midnight."
Peter closed the outer door, and taking Jan by the arm led her back into the sitting-room, where he put her in a corner of the big sofa and sat down beside her.
He could not speak, and Jan saw that the tears she could not shed were in his eyes, those large dark eyes that could appear so sombre and then again so kind.
Jan watched him enviously. She was acutely conscious of trifling things. She even noticed what very black eyebrows he had and how—as always, when he was either angry or deeply
moved—the veins in his forehead stood out in a strongly-marked V.
"It was best, I think," Jan said, and even to herself her voice sounded like the voice of a stranger. "She would have been very unhappy if she had lived."
Peter started at the cool, hard tones, and looked at her. Then, simply and naturally, like a child, he took her hand and held it; and there was that in the human contact, in the firm, comfortable clasp, that seemed to break something down in Jan, and all at once she felt weak and faint and trembling. She leaned her head against the pillows piled high in the corner where Fay had always rested. The electric light in the verandah seemed suddenly to recede to an immense distance and became a tiny luminous pin-head, like a far lone star.
She heard Peter moving about in the dining-room behind and clinking things, but she felt quite incapable of going to see what he was doing or of trying to be hospitable—besides, it was his house, he knew where things were, and she was so tired.