"Oh, come and look at this," she whispered to Gert. "With deepest sympathy from Colonel and Lady Grainger."
Mrs. Hammond, black-veiled and pathetic, entered the hall. They all fell back respectfully. She leaned above the lilies, touching their waxen trumpets with a gentle finger. She also lifted the card.
"Oh, Muriel, how kind of them!" she cried softly. "How very, very kind."
But Muriel went away and cried bitterly because Connie was dead, and now she had not even a sister left who needed her.
BOOK IV
DELIA
March, 1919—January, 1920
XXXIII
The meeting of the House Committee for St. Catherine's Home was over when Muriel entered the room. Down the dining-room table of Miller's Rise were scattered notebooks, sheets of blotting-paper, and occasional inkpots. Mrs. Hammond, in her black and white dress, talked with animation to the Honble. Mrs. Potter Vallery. When Muriel saw this, she smiled a little. Nobody noticed the smile but Mr. Vaughan, and it made him feel vaguely uneasy.
He had not been to Miller's Rise for a long time, not indeed since the spring of 1916, when he had called to offer his sympathy after Connie's death. Miller's Rise was not very near to the Vicarage, and he hated calls, and though Mrs. Hammond was charming up to a point—rather a low point perhaps—the vicar never felt quite happy in her old-rose drawing-room. He sat now a little apart from the assembled ladies, hoping very much that Mrs. Cartwright, or Miss Rymer, the Matron of St. Simeon's, would not consider it their duty to approach him sociably. He found that Marshington committees depressed him because nobody was quite whole-hearted over anything. Even when the House Committee laid a request for new clothes-horses before the General Committee, everybody seemed to weigh the question in the balance against Mrs. Potter Vallery's approval or Mrs. Cartwright's possible discomfiture. Hedging from self-interest to sentimental altruism, weighing a hundred side-issues against the case presented, they gave their opinions from policy rather than conviction. This distressed the vicar. But he had decided long ago that these committees were very good for the ladies, and did little harm to the Rescue Work, and that God frequently pours the waters of His mercy from imperfect vessels. So, with one eye on the clock, the vicar had taken the chair at this "extraordinary" but quite usual meeting, wondering how soon he could escape to his peaceful library and "The Personnel of the Estate of Clergy during the Lancastrian Experiment." Whenever particularly bored by the limitations of his parishioners, he fled to the study of the limitations of his countrymen in former centuries and found it consoling.