But Richard saved me, and sent her away angry.  I crept back to the bed, and lay down on it again.  I heard the others whispering as they passed through the hall.  Mary Leighton was crying; Charlotte was silent.  I don’t think I heard her voice at all.

After a long while I heard them go down, and go into the dining-room.  They spoke in very subdued tones, and there was only the slightest movement of china and silver, to indicate that a meal was going on.  But this seemed to give me a more frantic sense of change than anything else.  I flung myself across the bed, and another of those dreadful, tearless spasms seized me.  Everything—­all life—­was going on just the same; even in this very house they were eating and drinking as they ate and drank before—­the very people who had talked with him this day; the very table at which he had sat this morning.  Oh! they were so heartless and selfish:  every one was; life itself was.  I did not know where to turn for comfort.  I had a feeling of dreading every one, of shrinking away from every one.

“Oh!” I said to myself, “if Richard is with them at the table, I never want to see him again.”

But Richard was not with them.  In a moment or two he came to the door, only to ask me if I wanted anything, and to say he would come back by-and-by.

There was a question which I longed so frantically to ask him, but which I dared not; my life seemed to hang on the answer. When were they going to take him away? I had heard something about trains and carriages, and I had a wild dread that it was soon to be.

I went to the door and called Richard back, and made him understand what I wanted to know.  He looked troubled, and said in a low tone,

“At four o’clock we go from here to meet the earliest train.  I have telegraphed his friends, and have had an answer.  I am going down myself, and it is all arranged in the best way, I think.  Go and lie down now, Pauline; I will come and take you down soon as the house is quiet.”

Richard went away unconscious of the stab his news had given me.  I had not counted on anything so sudden as this parting.  While he was in the house, while I was again to look upon his face, the end had not come; there was a sort of hope, though only a hope of suffering, something to look forward to, before black monotony began its endless day.

CHAPTER XVII.

BESIDE HIM ONCE AGAIN.

     There are blind ways provided, the foredone
     Heart-weary player in this pageant world
     Drops out by, letting the main masque defile
     By the conspicuous portal.

     R.  Browning.

     What is this world?  What asken men to have? 
     Now with his love—­now in his cold grave—­
     Alone, withouten any companie!

     Chaucer.

The tall old clock, which stood by the dining-room door, had struck two, and been silent many minutes, before Richard came to me.  I had spent those dreadful hours in feverish restlessness:  my room seemed suffocating to me.  I had walked about, had put away my trinkets, I had changed my dress, and put on a white one which I had worn in the morning, and had tried to braid my hair.