XXXII
The dawn came soon in those late August days, but it seemed as if the darkness would never be at an end that night. Margaret sat in the living-room in the big chair by the fireplace; it faced the one that had been her mother's, and she looked at the arm on which she had perched herself so often in the happy morning talks of old—the mornings that were all at an end for ever and ever. She had set the door wide open and the sweet air came in, chilly, and with a strange sense of what had happened.
Towsey found her presently. "We wondered where you'd got to," she said.
"I went to the garden, and through the field—I wanted to think for a little while."
"I made the bed in your room ready, but I suppose when you looked in it was still covered up, and you didn't feel like staying there."
"I don't like staying anywhere," Margaret answered, with the restlessness that cannot find expression keen upon her.
"You had better come into the kitchen—there's a cup of hot milk ready; you must want something. Hannah's just gone to lie down; she's been anxious and wondering what had become of you; but she thought you had gone to the wood, and it was no good looking for you."
They sat down in the kitchen opposite each other by the table, the old woman, whose eyes were swollen with weeping, and the girl with the scared, white face, who had just seen death for the first time.
"I am thinking of my father," she said to Towsey; "he doesn't know yet—probably he's grieving for Uncle Cyril, but looking forward to coming back to mother. It is so dreadful to think that he'll never see her more."