His wife had reminded him of his sister Janet, with her blank blue eyes, her soft white face and her curious crouching attitude, like an animal expecting the whip.
He gave a wild laugh; for that one startled moment he had thought it was his sister, and she dead twenty years! His thoughts were wandering; he laughed again recklessly and flinging his head back, looked up.
Lady Dalrymple had come to the head of the stairs and was peering down, her hands clasped behind her—surely it was his sister—and the house was haunted as he had known—known—
So strong was the feeling that the man felt the word forming on his lips, “Janet!”
The woman suddenly broke into laughter, crazily, an echo of his own and turned away and disappeared, and the Master of Stair flung on his way with the sound of it in his ears.
CHAPTER XV
THE AVOWAL
The afternoon service at Westminster Abbey had commenced; Delia Featherstonehaugh sat in the cloisters and listened to the lift of the singing. The place was yellow with the late sunshine; through the open arches glittered the untrodden snow under the faint blue of an English winter sky.
Save for the sound of the organ and the half-muffled singing there was such silence that the whirr past of a bird became a notable thing. Delia gazed down the shadowy cloisters into their dimness, barred with the gold of the sunshine. She noted the slender stone ribbings rising perfectly to join like hands in prayer, somewhere in the mystery of the dark roof, and the Tudor roses each with its golden counterpart on the gray flagstone, and she sighed, for no reason save the stillness of it all.
Close under her feet was the brass gravestone of a bishop, who had been dust for three hundred years; his Latin titles, shining in the sun, measured many paces; against the wall near by was a tablet to the memory of one three years dead, and this was all it bore beside her name: “Dear childe.”
Faintly through the Abbey walls came the choir’s singing as disembodied, as grave as angels’; Delia’s hands slipped out of her muff and onto the stone beside her; her lips parted and her head sank back against the gray old wall; under her red coat her heart was heaving passionately.