She had not cried, as most children of eight would have done, but she had suffered in a kind of frozen silence, incapable of any outward expression of grief.
“Unfeelin', I call it!” declared the woman who lived on the same floor as the Tennants, and who had attended at the doctor's behest, to a friend and neighbour who was occupied in boiling a kettle over a gas-ring. “Must be a cold-'earted child as can see 'er own mother lyin' dead without so much as a tear.” She sniffed. “'Aven't you got that cup o' tea ready yet? I can allus drink a cup o' tea after a layin'-out.”
Sara had watched the two women drinking their tea with brooding eyes, her small breast heaving with the intensity of her resentment. Without being in any way able to define her emotions, she felt that there was something horrible in their frank enjoyment of the steaming liquid, gulped down to the cheerful accompaniment of a running stream of intimate gossip, while all the time that quiet figure lay on the narrow bed—motionless, silent, wrapped in the strange and immense aloofness of the dead.
Presently one of the women poured out a third cup of tea and pushed it towards the child, slopping in the thin, bluish-looking milk with a generous hand.
“'Ave a cup, child. It's as good a drop o' tea as ever I tasted.”
For a moment Sara stared at her speechlessly; then, with a sudden passionate gesture, she swept the cup on to the floor.
The clash of breaking china seemed to ring through the chamber of death, the women's voices rose shrilly in reproof, and Sara, fleeing into the adjoining room, cast herself face downwards upon the floor, horror-stricken. It was not the raucous anger of the women which she heeded; that passed her by. But she had outraged some fine, instinctive sense by reverence that lay deep within her own small soul.
Still she did not cry. Only, as she lay on the ground with her face hidden, she kept repeating in a tense whisper—
“You know I didn't mean it, God! You know I didn't mean it!”
It was then that Patrick Lovell had appeared, coming in response to she knew not what summons, and had taken her away with him. And the tendrils of her affection, wrenched from their accustomed hold, had twined themselves about this grey-haired, blue-eyed man, set so apart by every soigné detail of his person from the shabby, slip-shod world which Sara had known, but who yet stood beside the bed on which her mother lay, with a wrung mouth beneath his clipped moustache and a mist of tears dimming his keen eyes.