"It is the letter that has done it. Oh, how unfortunate!" So Gwen spoke, to the Granny, in the kitchen: for Ruth, though attending to the Sunday dinner, was for the moment absent. So the letter could be referred to.
"I fear what your ladyship says is true."
"But at least we know what it is that has done it. That is something." Granny Marrable seemed slow to understand. "I mean, if it had not been for the letter, she certainly need not have been any worse than she was last Sunday. She was getting on so well, Ruth said, on Friday, after the champagne. Oh dear!"
"It will be as God wills, my lady. If my dear sister is again to be taken from me...."
"Oh, Granny, do not let us talk like that!" But Gwen could put little heart into her protest. The doctor had taken all the wind out of her sails.
Old Phoebe let the interruption pass. "If Maisie dies.... said she, and stopped.
"If Maisie dies...?" said Gwen, and waited.
The answer came, but not at once. "It is the second time."
"I don't think I quite understand, Granny," said Gwen gently. Which was meant, that this made it easier to bear, or harder?
"I am slow to speak what I think, my lady. I would like to find words to say it.... I lost Maisie forty-five—yes!—forty-six years ago, and the grief of her loss is with me still. Had she died here, near at hand, so I might have known where they laid her, I would have kept fresh flowers on her grave till now. But she was dead, far away across the sea. I am too old now for what has come of it. But I can see what-like it all is. Maisie is with me again, from the tomb—for a little while, and then to go. She will go first, and I shall soon follow; it cannot be long. No—it cannot be long! The light will come. And God be praised for His goodness! We shall lie in one grave, Maisie and I. We shall not be parted in Death." These last words Gwen accepted as conventional. She listened, somewhat as in a dream, to Granny Marrable's voice, going quietly on, with no very audible undertone of pain in it:—"It is not of myself I am thinking, but my child. She has found her mother, and loved her, before she knew it was herself, risen from the grave.... Oh no—no—no, my lady, I know it all well. My head is right. Maisie has been at hand these long years past, all unknown to me—oh, how cruelly unknown!" Here her words broke a little, with audible pain. "Her coming to us has been a resurrection from the tomb. It is little to me now, I am so near the end. But my heart goes out to my child, who will lose her mother.... Hush, she is coming back!"