CHAPTER L
"There cannot be a pinch in death more sharp than this is."
The Bishop's sister, Miss Keane, whose life was a perpetual orgy of mothers' meetings and G.F.S. gatherings, was holding a district visitors' working party in the drawing-room at the Palace. The ladies knitted and stitched, while one of their number heaped fuel on the flame of their enthusiasm by reading aloud the "History of the Diocese of Southminster."
Miss Keane took but little heed of the presence of Rachel and Hester in her brother's house. Those who work mechanically on fixed lines seem, as a rule, to miss the pith of life. She was kind when she remembered them, but her heart was where her treasure was—namely, in her escritoire, with her list of Bible-classes, and servants' choral unions, and the long roll of contributors to the guild of work which she herself had started.
When she had been up to Hester's room, invariably at hours when Hester could not see her, and when she had entered Rachel's sledge-hammer subscriptions in her various account-books, her attention left her visitors. She considered them superficial, and wondered how it was that her brother could find time to spend hours talking to both of them, while he had rarely a moment in which to address her chosen band in the drawing-room. She was one of those persons who find life a very prosaic affair, quite unlike the fiction she occasionally read.
She often remarked that nothing except the commonplace happened. Certainly she never observed anything else.
So Hester lay in the room above, halting feebly between two opinions, whether to live or to die, and Rachel sat in the Bishop's study beneath, waiting to make tea for him on his return from the confirmation.
If she did not make it, no one else did. Instead of ringing for it he went without it.
Rachel watched the sun set—a red ball dropping down a frosty sky. It was the last day of the year. The new year was bringing her everything.
"Good-bye, good-bye," she said, looking at the last rim of the sun as he sank. And she remembered other years when she had watched the sun set on the last day of December, when life had been difficult—how difficult!