'I should like to wait,' Jane said, 'until Sir Edward arrives, and to hear what he has to say.'
A footman came in to clear away lunch, and then the two lovers went and sat together on the library sofa, and looked out on the long stretches of gardens with their cold precision and want of sympathy. A luggage-cart, piled high with dress-baskets and portmanteaux, passed down the drive towards the station gates, and a motor-car returned from a neighbouring house for something that had been forgotten. After that there was silence both within and without the house; even the maids had gone downstairs to sit together and whisper. It was one of those grey days in early autumn which have an almost weird sense of stillness about them. Hardly a leaf stirred, and even the flight of the birds was noiseless and touched with the universal feeling of hush. The begonias and dahlias and flaming autumn flowers in the broad border below the southern terrace wall had lost half their colour in the grey afternoon, and a robin alighted softly on the window-sill and, putting his head on one side, looked into the library at the pair sitting on the sofa.
Neither had spoken for a time. To-morrow there would probably be lawyers to see and the funeral to arrange for, and a hundred things to do; but to-day there was a lull in which time itself seemed to have stood still. Years had passed since this morning, and yet the clocks marked only a few hours on their dials. Mrs. Ogilvie had died at twelve o'clock, and the very flowers which she had placed by her table still bloomed freshly, and a book she had been reading lay open where she had left it.
Yet it seemed a lifetime since she had died.
During the interminable afternoon, and in the stillness of the big library, with its ordered rows of books and solemn-looking, carved cupboards, Peter and Jane Erskine sat together feeling oppressively this great lapse of time that had passed. Their understanding of one another had always been a strong bond between them; and now they felt not like the lovers of yesterday, but like those whose lives have been linked for years, and for whom loyalty and faith have grown deeper and stronger as troubles and storms came. They looked across to the ruined tower, where not very long ago, as we count time, they had told their love to each other; and, so looking, had drawn closer by their common sorrow. It seemed to them, in the hush of the library, that this time of grief and dependence had something arresting in it. Life had not demanded very much of them so far. To-day there was a strange sense that its demands, perhaps even for them, would not always be small.
The doctor and the lawyer summoned Peter presently, and afterwards he and Jane were told particulars of Mrs. Ogilvie's fatal illness.
'But she must have suffered—she must have suffered so!' said Jane, with all the resentfulness that youth feels towards pain. 'Why did she tell none of us? Why did none of us know?'
'I ought to have guessed something,' said Peter miserably. 'I must have been a fool not to see that something was wrong.' And together they wondered what would have happened if this had been done or that, and were inclined to reproach themselves for much in which they were in no measure to blame. They walked back through the dim, still woods; and at the white gates of Jane's pleasant home Peter left her, and she went on alone to meet Miss Abingdon.
It was late that night before the two sorrowful women went to bed; and hardly was breakfast over in the morning before, with the restlessness born of recent grief, Miss Abingdon was seeking anxiously to know what she could do or what ought to be done.
'If,' she said, 'I felt that I could even be of use by going up to town and choosing the servants' mourning, I should feel that I was doing something.'