struck her as delicious.  She looked close at Arthur’s sagacious, shrewd, and kindly face, with the heavy, clipped moustache, and the bluish chin, and those grey hairs at the sides of the forehead.  ‘We belong to the same generation, he and I,’ she thought, eating bread and butter with relish, ’and we are not so very old, after all!’ Aunt Hannah was incomparably older, ripe for death.  Who could be profoundly moved by that unimportant, that trivial, demise?  She felt very sorry for Uncle Meshach, but no more than that.  Such sentiments may have the appearance of callousness, but they were the authentic sentiments of Leonora, and Leonora was not callous.  The financial aspect of Aunt Hannah’s death, as it affected John and herself and the girls and their home, did not disturb her.  She was removed far above finance, far above any preoccupation about the latter years, as she sat talking quietly and blissfully with Arthur in the drawing-room.

‘Yes,’ she was telling him, ‘it was just opposite the Clayton-Vernons’ that I met them.’

‘Where the elm-trees spread over the road?’ he questioned.

She nodded, pleased by his minute interest in her narrative and by his knowledge of the neighbourhood.  ’I saw them both a long way off, walking quickly, under a gas-lamp.  And it’s very curious, but although I was so anxious to know what had happened, I couldn’t go on to meet them—­I was obliged to wait until they came up.  And they didn’t notice me at first, and then Ethel shrieked out:  “Oh, it’s mother!” And Milly said:  “Aunt Hannah’s dead, mother.  Is Uncle Meshach dead?” You can’t understand how queer I felt.  I felt as if Milly would go on asking and asking:  “Is father dead?  Is Bessie dead?  Is Bran dead?  Are you dead?"’

‘I know,’ he said reflectively.

She guessed that he envied her the strange nocturnal adventure.  And her secret pride in the adventure, which hitherto she had endeavoured to suppress, suddenly became open and legitimate.  She allowed her face to disclose the thought:  ’You see that I too have lived through crises, and that I can appreciate how wonderful they are.’  And she proceeded to give him all the details of Aunt Hannah’s death, as she had learnt them from Ethel and Milly during the walk home through sleeping Hillport:  how the servant had grown alarmed, and had called a neighbour by breaking a bedroom window with a broomstick, leaning from Aunt Hannah’s window, and how the neighbour’s eldest boy had run for Dr. Adams and had caught him in the street just as he was returning home, and how Aunt Hannah was gone before the boy came back with Dr. Adams, and how no one could guess what had happened to Uncle Meshach, and no one could suggest what to do, until Ethel and Milly knocked at the door.

‘Isn’t it all strange?  Don’t you think it’s strange?’ Leonora demanded.

‘No,’ he said.  ’It seems strange, but it isn’t really.  Such things are always happening.’