Then, again, she was not free to indulge in idle grief, in the luxury of woe; the great house had still to be run, she had to bury her beloved dead, the mourning which seems such a hopeless mockery when the heart is racked with misery, had to be seen to; and she did it, and went through it all, with outward calm, sustained by that Heron spirit which may be described as the religion of her class—­noblesse oblige.  Jessie had wept loudly through the house ever since the death, and could weep as loudly now; but if Ida shed any tears she wept in the silence and darkness of her own room, and no one heard her utter a moan.  “To suffer in silence and be strong” was the badge of all her tribe, and she wore it with quiet stoicism.

Godfrey Heron’s death had happened so suddenly that the news of it scarcely got beyond the radius of the estate before the following morning, and Stafford had gone to London in ignorance of this second blow with which Fate had followed up the one he had dealt Ida:  and when the neighbours—­the Vaynes, the Bannerdales, and the Avorys—­came quickly and readily enough to offer their sympathy and help, they could do nothing.  The girl solitary and lonely in her grief as she had been solitary and lonely through her life, would see no one but the doctor and Mr. Wordley, and the people who had once been warm and intimate friends of the family left reluctantly and sully, to talk over the melancholy circumstance, and to wonder what would become of the daughter of the eccentric man who had lived the life of a recluse.  Mr. Wordley would have liked to have persuaded her to see some of the women who had hastened to comfort her; but he knew that any attempt at persuasion would have been in vain, that he would not have been able to break down the barrier of reserve which the girl had instinctively and reservedly erected between her suffering soul and the world.  His heart ached for her, and he did all that a man could do to lighten the burden of her trouble; but there was very little that he could do beyond superintending the necessary arrangements for the funeral.

His first thought was of the relatives; but, somewhat to his own dismay, he found that the only one whom he could trace was a certain cousin, a more than middle-aged man who, though he bore the name of Heron, was quite unknown to Ida, and, so far as Mr. Wordley was aware, had not crossed the threshold of the Hall for many years.  He was a certain John Heron, a retired barrister, who had gone in for religion, not in the form of either of the Established Churches, but of that of one of the least known sects, the members of which called themselves some kind of brothers, were supposed to be very strict observers of the Scriptural law, and were considered by those who did not belong to them both narrow-minded and uncharitable.

Mr. John Heron was a prominent member of this little sect, and was famous in its small circles for his extreme sanctity and his eloquence as a lay preacher.  Mr. Wordley, with much misgiving, had invited this, the only relative he could find, to the funeral, and Ida was now awaiting this gentleman’s arrival.