“Never mind; there’s your breakfast getting cold. You had better have some fresh tea made.”
His sister surrendered the letter with a spirit of amiable self-negation.
“The money ought to make a difference to them,” she said, softly, taking off her spectacles and wiping them with slow, pensive hands.
“Money always makes a difference, my dear, especially when people are heroically proud.”
Miss Phyllis Carmagee’s thoughts were towards that gray-skied, slaving, sordid town where Gwen was buried, as she sipped her tea and looked at her brother’s empty chair. She was a woman whom many of her neighbors thought stolid and reserved, a woman not gifted with great powers of self-expression. Friendship with many is a mere gratification of the social ego. The vivacious people who delight in conversationalism, take pleasure in those personalities that are new and pleasing for the moment, even as they are interested in new and complex flowers. To Phyllis Carmagee, however, her friends had more of the enduring dearness of familiar trees. They were part of her consciousness, part of her daily and her yearly life.
Porteus’s sister came by an idea as she sat alone at the breakfast-table that morning. Serene and obese natures are slow in conceiving, yet the concept may have the greater stability for the very slowness of the progress. The crystallization of that idea went on all day, till it was ready to be displayed in its completeness to her brother as he dined. Miss Carmagee had decided to go down to Wilton, and to show that her friendship was worth a long day’s journey. A sentimental and unctuous letter would have sufficed for a mere worldling. But Porteus Carmagee’s sister had that rare habit of being loyal and sincere.
“I should like to see the child’s grave,” she said, quietly, her round, white face very soft and gentle in the light of the shaded lamp; “it seems hard to realize that the little thing is dead. Gwen meant so much to her father. I wonder what they are going to do.”
Porteus Carmagee stared hard at the silver epergne full of daffodils before him on the table. They were at dessert, and alone, with the curtains drawn, and a wood fire burning in the old-fashioned grate. The whole setting of the room spoke of a generation that was past. It suggested solidity and repose, placid kindliness, prosaic comfort.
“Murchison ought never to have left us,” said the lawyer, curtly.
“No.”