"Yes, it is awful; Death is always awful," answered Christabel, mechanically.
She had told herself that it was her duty to appear at the dinner-table—to fulfil all her responsibilities as wife and hostess—not to give any one the right to say that she was bemoaning him who had once been her lover; and she was here to do her duty. She wanted all the inhabitants of her little world to see that she mourned for him only as a friend grieves for the loss of a friend—soberly, with pious submission to the Divine Will that had taken him away. For two hours she had remained on her knees beside her bed, drowned in tears, numbed by despair, feeling as if life could not go on without him, as if this heavily-beating heart of hers must be slowly throbbing to extinction: and then the light of reason had begun to glimmer through the thick gloom of grief, and her lips had moved in prayer, and, as if in answer to her prayers, came the image of her child, to comfort and sustain her.
"Let me not dishonour my darling," she prayed. "Let me remember that I am a mother as well as a wife. If I owe my husband very little, I owe my son everything."
Inspired by that sweet thought of her boy, unwilling, for his sake, to give occasion for even the feeblest scandal, she had washed the tears from her pale cheeks, and put on a dinner gown, and had gone down to the drawing-room just ten minutes before the announcement of dinner.
She remembered how David, when his beloved was dead, had risen and washed and gone back to the business of life. "What use are my tears to him, now he is gone?" she said to herself, as she went downstairs.
Miss Bridgeman was not in the drawing-room; but Mopsy was there, dressed in black, and looking very miserable.
"I could not get poor Dop to come down," she said, apologetically. "She has been lying on her bed crying ever since she heard the dreadful news. She is so sensitive, poor girl; and she liked him so much; and he had been so attentive to her. I hope you'll excuse her?"
"Please don't apologize. I can quite imagine that this shock has been dreadful for her—for every one in the house. Perhaps you would rather dine upstairs, so as to be with your sister?"
"No!" answered Mopsy, taking Christabel's hand, with a touch of real feeling. "I had rather be with you. You must feel his loss more than we can—you had known him so much longer."
"Yes, it is just five years since he came to Mount Royal. Five years is not much in the lives of some people; but it seems the greater part of my life."