Mr. Tapster bent his head; he was too much bewildered to propose any other plan; and then he turned, turned to see his hall invaded by a strange and sinister quartet. It was composed of two policemen and of two of those loafers of whom he so greatly disapproved. They were carrying a hurdle from which Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But, though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light a burden as Flossy drowned.
There came a sudden short whisper-filled delay. The doorway of the dining-room was found to be too narrow, and the hurdle was perforce left in the hall.
An urgent voice, full of wholly unconscious irony, muttered in Mr. Tapster's ear: "Of course, you would like to see her, sir," and he felt himself being propelled forward. Making an effort to bear himself so that he should not feel afterward ashamed of his lack of nerve, he forced himself to stare with dread-filled yet fascinated eyes at that which had just been laid upon the leather sofa.
Flossy's hat, the shabby hat which had shocked Mr. Tapster's sense of what was seemly, was gone; her fair hair had all come down, and hung in pale-gold wisps about the face already fixed in the soft dignity which seems so soon to drape the features of those who die by drowning. Her widely opened eyes were now wholly emptied of the anguish with which they had gazed on Mr. Tapster in this very room less than an hour ago. Her mean brown serge gown, from which the water was still dripping, clung closely to her limbs, revealing the slender body which had four times endured, on behalf of Mr. Tapster, the greatest of woman's natural ordeals. But that thought, it is scarcely necessary to say, did not come to add an extra pang to those which that unfortunate man was now suffering, for Mr. Tapster naturally thought maternity was in every married woman's day's work—and pleasure.
It might have been a moment, for all that he knew, or it might have been an hour, when at last something came to relieve the unbearable tension of Mr. Tapster's feelings. He had been standing aside, helpless, aware of and yet not watching the efforts made to restore Flossy to consciousness.
The doctor raised himself and straightened his cramped shoulders and tired arms. With a look of great concern on his face, he approached the bereaved husband.
"I'm afraid it's no good," he said; "the shock of the plunge in the cold water probably killed her. She was evidently in poor health, and—and ill-nourished; but, of course, we shall go on for some time longer, and——"
But whatever he had meant to say remained unspoken, for a telegraph-boy, with the impudence natural to his kind, was forcing his way into and through the crowded room. "James Tapster, Esquire?" he cried in a high, childish treble.
The master of the house held out his hand mechanically. He took the buff envelop and stared down at it, sufficiently master of himself to perceive that some fool had apparently imagined Cumberland Crescent to be in South London; before his eyes swam the line, "Delayed in transmission." Then, opening the envelop, he saw the message for which he had now been waiting so eagerly for some days; but it was with indifference that he read the words,