This parting seemed sufficiently justified by the circumstances. The funeral day! Could it be otherwise than that their nerves were highly strung, and words of love and mutual support, which might have seemed exaggerated at other times, should now have seemed natural? Rosalind, with her heart bursting, went back to her aunt’s side, and sat down and listened to her placid talk. She would rather have been with her suffering mother, but for that worn-out woman there was nothing so good as rest.
Mrs. Trevanion went back to the nursery, where her little children were fast asleep in their cots, and Sophy preparing for bed. Sophy was still grumbling over the fact that she had not been allowed to go down to dessert. “Why shouldn’t I go down?” she cried, sitting on the floor, taking off her shoes. “Oh, here’s mamma! What difference could it have made? Grown-up people are nasty and cruel. I should not have done any harm going down-stairs. Reggie is dining down-stairs. He is always the one that is petted, because he is a boy, though he is only five years older than me.”
“Hush, Miss Sophy. It was your mamma’s doing, and mammas are always right.”
“You don’t think so, Russell. Oh, I don’t want to kiss you, mamma. It was so unkind, and Reggie going on Monday; and I have not been down to dessert—not for a week.”
“But I must kiss you, Sophy,” the mother said. “You are going away with your aunt and Rosalind, on a visit. Is not that better than coming down to dessert?”
“Oh, mamma!” The child jumped up with one shoe on, and threw herself against her mother’s breast. “Oh, I am so glad. Aunt Sophy lets us do whatever we please.” She gave a careless kiss in response to Mrs. Trevanion’s embrace. “I should like to stay there forever,” Sophy said.
There was a smile on the mother’s face as she withdrew it, as there had been a smile of strange wonder and wistfulness when she took leave of Rex. The little ones were asleep. She went and stood for a moment between the two white cots. Then all was done; and the hour had come to which, without knowing what awaited her, she had looked with so much terror on the previous night.
A dark night, with sudden blasts of rain, and a sighing wind which moaned about the house, and gave notes of warning of the dreary wintry weather to come. As Mrs. Lennox and Rosalind sat silent over the fire, there suddenly seemed to come in and pervade the luxurious house a blast, as if the night had entered bodily, a great draught of fresh, cold, odorous, rainy air, charged with the breath of the wet fields and earth. And then there was the muffled sound as of a closed door. “What is that?” said Aunt Sophy, pricking up her ears, “It cannot be visitors come so late, and on such a day as this.”
“It sounds like some one going out,” Rosalind said, with a shiver, thinking on what she had seen last night. “Perhaps,” she added eagerly, after a moment, with a great sense of relief, “Mr. Blake going away.”
“It will be that, of course, though I did not hear wheels; and what a dismal night for his drive, poor old gentleman. That wind always makes me wretched. It moans and groans like a human creature. But it is very odd, Rosalind, that we did not hear any wheels.”