“She must have had a tussle for it!” Susan says, once again addressing herself, and adding to her inward remark the rider, “How well I know her!” A second reflection corrects the present tense, “Should I not rather say, ‘How well I knew her’? Shall I know her as well when I see her to-morrow after these five months of absence? Five months to-day since they went! How little she has told me in her letters! Have our souls grown so far apart, while she has been passing through her burning fiery furnace, and I have been scolding the children, and ordering dinner, and emptying my medicine-chest down the parish throats, that they will not know each other when they meet?” A deeper thought laden with misgiving follows. Does the Refiner Himself recognize the silver that He has thrown into the melting-pot when it emerges again?
It is not often that the rector’s busy wife can stand idle, deeply sunk in meditations, which her children, with their customary nice feeling, refrain from infringing by any of their usually numberless appeals. With noiseless reverence they are laying their wreath, made of flowers bought at the Shipstone florist’s at a cost that has chipped a large paring off the two next birthdays, which jostle Christmas so expensively close, on the just replaced turf.
“We heard that it was up!” says a voice beside her, awaking Mrs. Darcy out of her grave musings, to find herself with two members of the Prince family, each laden with a magnificent “floral tribute” on either hand.
“Yes; it was finished this afternoon,” she answers, giving a slight start, and speaking involuntarily half under her breath.
“What a beautiful text!” sighs Mrs. Prince, letting fall the tortoiseshell eye-glass which has helped her to read the inscription. “It is the one that, if it were possible, I should choose out of all the Bible to have placed over me.”
“Unless you die simultaneously with my father, I do not quite see how it is to be managed!” answers Féodorovna, disagreeably.
Her mother reddens a little. “I do not see that that follows! Six months and more elapsed between the deaths of these dear fellows; and yet what can be more suitable and lovely?”
Miss Prince does not waste breath upon a rejoinder, but stoops her long body to place a superb cross of lilies-of-the-valley, which seems instantaneously to wipe out of existence the modest Shipstone Roman hyacinths, with their one frugal arum lily, in a prominent position upon the grave.
The young donors of the eclipsed offering stand by with swelling hearts. Their Christmas gift to the dead has pinched them to the extent of absolutely precluding the purchase of “Bobs’” last photograph, tantalizingly beaming on them from the stationer’s front window, to the attainment of which their mother has stony-heartedly refused to help them with a loan; and about which Miss Brine has benightedly observed that thirty photographs of one individual must be enough for any private collection, were he ten times as great a hero as Lord Roberts. The monstrousness of the supposition that any such hypothetical demi-god can exist or ever has existed, and the consequent conviction that the governess is a pro-Boer, produces a warmth of feeling against that lady, which her departure upon her Christmas holidays only partially cools.
“They are coming home to-night, I hear,” says Mrs. Prince, stopping, in her turn, to deposit her sumptuous circle of orchids, but laying it unobtrusively just within the stone coping at the grave-foot, and somehow not making the children feel as small as Féodorovna had done.