It cannot be denied that the present time, this first day after coming home, was one of peculiar pain to Mrs. Dundyke. She would have to go over the sad and strange story again and again, and there was no help for it. The chief partners in Fenchurch-street naturally required the particulars; the few friends she had, the household servants, wished to hear them, and there was only herself to tell the tale.
By ten o'clock, on the morning after her arrival, the second partner of the house, who wore rings and a moustache, and had altogether been an object of envy to the unfortunate common-councilman, was sitting with Mrs. Dundyke. She had not put on widow's weeds; she would not yet; she had said to Mary Prattleton, with a burst of grief, that a widow's cap would take the last remnant of lingering hope out of her. She wore a rich black silk gown, trimmed with much crape, but the cap and bonnet of the widow she assumed not.
Mr. Knowles, a kind-hearted man, who did not want for good sense, dandy though he was in dress, sat twirling his sandy moustache, the very gravest concern pervading his countenance. Mrs. Dundyke, who had never seen this gentleman more than once or twice, sat in humility, struggling with her grief. His social position was of a different standing from what poor Mr. Dundyke's had ever been.
"You see, Mrs. Dundyke, one hardly knows how to act, or what to be at," he remarked, after they had talked for some time, and she had related to him the details (always excepting any suspicion she might once have entertained of Mr. Hardcastle) as closely as she could. "Apart from the grief, the concern for your husband personally, it is altogether so awkward an affair, in a business point of view: we don't know whether we are to consider him as dead or alive."
She shook her head.
"There is little hope that he is alive, sir."
"Well, it would really seem like it. But what can have become of him?"
"There was the lake, you know."
"Yes."