She arranged all her own books and possessions in the large room looking into the stable yard, which had been Sir Godfrey’s study from the time he went to Eton. She found all his Eton books on a lower shelf of one of the book-cases, and she sat on the floor for an hour dusting grammars and dictionary, First Greek Reader, Latin Gradus, and all the rest of them. She found his college books, with the college arms upon them, on another shelf. She would have nothing disturbed or altered, and she was supremely indifferent to the question of incongruity. Her own book-cases from Cheriton, the dainty toy book-cases of inlaid satin wood, were squeezed into the recesses on each side of the fireplace. Her photographs of mother, father, friends, horses, and dogs, were arranged upon the carved oak mantelpiece, above the quaint little cupboards with carved doors, spoil of old Belgian churches, still full of choice cigars, the young man’s store. His spurs and hunting-crops, canes, and boxing-gloves, decorated the panel between the two tall windows. His despatch box still stood upon the library table, and the dog Styx pushed the door open whenever it was left ajar and strolled into the room as by old established right.
She felt herself nearer her dead husband here than anywhere else; nearer even than in the churchyard, where she and Lady Jane went every afternoon with fresh flowers for his grave. They had not laid him in the family vault, but among the graves of gentle and simple, under the sunny turf. The marble was not yet carven which was to mark out his grave amidst those humbler resting-places.
Theodore Dalbrook had not seen his cousin since the day of the funeral. His father and his two sisters had called upon her at the Priory, and had brought back an account of the quiet dignity with which she bore herself in her melancholy position.
“I did not think she had so much solid sense,” said Janet; and then she and Sophia talked about the Priory as a dwelling-house, and of its inferiority to Cheriton, and speculated upon the amount of their cousin’s income.
“She has a splendid position. She will be a fine catch for some one by-and-by,” said Harrington. “I hope she won’t go and throw herself away upon an adventurer.”
“I hope not,” said his father, “but I suppose she will marry again? That seems inevitable.”
“I don’t see that it is inevitable,” argued Theodore, almost angrily. “She was devotedly attached to her husband. I suppose there is now and then a woman who can remain faithful to a first love——”
“When the first love is alive, and not always then,” put in Sophia, flippantly. “Of course she will marry again. If she wanted to remain single people would not let her, with her income.”
Theodore got up and walked to the window. His sister’s talk often set his teeth on edge, but rarely so much as it did to-day.