Until now, as already chronicled, she had remained in house or garden, prey to an apathy which, while not amounting to definite ill-health, refused interest and exertion.  She could not shake it off.  To her all things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless.  Religion failed to touch her state—­religion, that is, in the only form accessible.  The interior of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to say to her.  But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the door on its dead children with a heavy hand.—­And she suffered this religious coldness, although any idea that death of the body implies extinction of the spirit, extinction of personality, never occurred to her.  Damaris’ sense of the unseen was too ingrained, her commerce with it too actual for that.  No—­the spirit lived on.  He, her most beloved, lived on, himself, his very self; but far away from her.  In just this consisted the emptiness, the unspeakable and blank bitterness—­he was somewhere and she could not reach him.  The dreadful going away of his spirit, against which she had fought during the thirty-six hours of his illness, had reached its ordained consummation—­that was all.

The body which had contained and by that beloved spirit been so nobly animated, in its present awful peace, its blind dumb majesty, meant scarcely more to her than some alabaster or waxen effigy of her dead.  It was so like, yet so terrifyingly unlike Charles Verity in life!—­She had visited it morning and evening, since to leave it in solitude appeared wanting in reverence.  Throughout each night she thankfully knew that either Carteret, McCabe or Faircloth watched by it.  Yet to her it hardly retained as much of her father’s natural presence as the clothes he had worn, the books and papers littering his writing-table, the chair he preferred to sit in, his guns and swords upon the wall, or the collection of fishing-rods, walking-sticks and his spud stacked in a corner.

After the strain and publicity of the funeral her apathy deepened, perplexing and saddening Carteret and bringing Miss Felicia near to veritable wailing.  For while thanking them both she, in fact, put them both aside.  This in no sour or irritable humour; but with a listlessness and apartness hopeless to overcome.  She prayed them to give her time.  Soon she would begin again; but not just yet.  She “couldn’t begin again to order—­couldn’t make herself begin again.  They must not trouble, only be patient with her, please, a little longer—­she wasn’t, indeed she wasn’t, pretending”—­a statement which, in its simplicity, cut Carteret to the quick—­for “she meant to begin again directly she could.”

To-day the weather took an encouraging turn for the better.  Following the spell of fog and wet a northerly wind at last arose.  It swept the sky clear of clouds, the land of melancholy vapours, begetting a brilliance of atmosphere which wooed our maiden to come forth and once more affront the open.  She therefore ordered the dog-cart at two o’clock.  Would herself drive; and, “if Aunt Felicia didn’t mind and think her unsociable, would take Patch for sole company, because then”—­renewed apologies—­“she needn’t talk and she felt disinclined to do so.”