"Imagine," said Lady Dashwood, "Jim seeing me off at the station and then coming back here. Imagine him coming back alone, crunching over the gravel and going up the steps into the hall. You know what the hall is like—a sweet place—and those dim portraits on the walls all looking down at him out of their faded eyes! All men!"
May looked at her Aunt Lena gravely.
"Then see him look round! Silence—nobody there. Then see him go up that staircase. He looks into the drawing-room, that big empty room. Nobody, my dear, but that fast-looking clergyman over the fireplace. That's not all, May. I can see him go out and go to his library. Nobody there—everything silent—books—the Cardinal—and the ghost."
"Oh!" said May. She did not smile.
"Now, my dear," said Lady Dashwood, "I'm not going to think about it any more! I've done with it. Let's talk of something else." That, indeed, was the last that Lady Dashwood said about it.
When lunch time came May found herself seized with a physical contraction over her heart that prevented food from taking its usual course downward. She endured as long as she could, but at last she got up from the long silent table just as Robinson was about to go for a moment into the pantry. She threw a hurried excuse for going at his thin stooping back. She said she found she "hadn't time," and she examined her watch ostentatiously as she went out of the room.
"I'm going to take my last farewell of Oxford," May said, looking for a moment into Lady Dashwood's room. "I'm going for a walk. I am going to look at the High and at Magdalen Bridge."
Lady Dashwood smiled rather sadly. "Ah, yes," she said.
May found Louise packing with a slowness and an elaborate care that was a reproof somehow in itself. It seemed to say: "Ungrateful! All is thrown away on you. You care not——"
May put on her hat, and through the mirror she saw Louise rolling up Saint Joseph with some roughness in a silk muffler.