she had been dreaming of him as of a star.  Could so much, indeed, happen in two days?  She imagined blissfully, in her ignorance of human experience, that her case was without precedent.  Nay, her case appalled her in the rapidity of its development!  And was thereby the more thrilling!  She thought again:  “Yes, I could die for him—­and I would!” He was still the star, but—­such was the miracle—­she clasped him.

They heard Mrs. Tams knocking at the door.  Nothing would ever cure the charwoman’s habit of knocking before entering.  Rachel arose from the sofa as out of a bush of blossoms.  And in the artless, honest glance of her virginity and her simplicity, her eyes seemed to say to Mrs. Tams:  “Behold the phoenix among men!  He is to be my husband.”  Her pride in the strange, wondrous, incredible state of being affianced was tremendous, to the tragic point.

“Can ye hear, begging yer pardon?” said Mrs. Tams, pointing through the open door and upward.  “Her’s just begun to breathe o’ that’n [like that].”

The loud, stertorous sound of Mrs. Maldon unconsciously drawing the final breaths of life filled the whole house.  Louis and Rachel glanced at each other, scared, shamed, even horrified, to discover that the vast pendulum of the universe was still solemnly ticking through their ecstasy.

“I’m coming,” said Rachel.

CHAPTER IX

THE MARRIED WOMAN

I

Wonderful things happen.  If anybody had foretold to Mrs. Tams that in her fifty-eighth year she would accede to the honourable order of the starched white cap, Mrs. Tams could not have credited the prophecy.  But there she stood, in the lobby of the house at Bycars, frocked in black, with the strings of a plain but fine white apron stretched round her stoutness, and the cap crowning her grey hair.  It was Louis who had insisted on the cap, which Rachel had thought unnecessary and even snobbish, and which Mrs. Tams had nervously deprecated.  Not without pleasure, however, had both women yielded to his indeed unanswerable argument:  “You can’t possibly have a servant opening the door without a cap.  It’s unthinkable.”

Thus in her latter years of grandmotherhood had Mrs. Tams cast off the sackcloth of the charwoman and become a glorious domestic servant, with a room of her own in the house, and no responsibilities beyond the house, and no right to leave the house save once a week, when she visited younger generations, who still took from her and gave nothing back.  She owed the advancement to Rachel, who, quite unused to engaging servants, and alarmed by harrowing stories of the futility of registry offices and advertisements, had seen in Mrs. Tams the comfortable solution of a fearful problem.  Louis would have preferred a younger, slimmer, nattier, fluffier creature than Mrs. Tams, but was ready to be convinced that such as he wanted lived only in his fancy.  Moreover, he liked Mrs. Tams, and would occasionally flatter her by a smack on the shoulder.