‘Mr. Dain,’ Bessie proclaimed.

‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Stanway?  Stanway not come in yet, eh?’ said the stout lawyer, approaching her hurriedly with his fussy, awkward gait.

She could have laughed; but the visit was at any rate a distraction.

A few minutes later John arrived.

‘Dain will stay for tea, Nora.  Eh, Dain?’ he said.

‘Well—­thanks,’ was Dain’s reply.

She asked herself, with sudden misgiving, what new thing was afoot.

After tea, the two men were left together at the table.

‘Mother,’ Ethel inquired eagerly, coming into the drawing-room, ’why are father and Mr. Dain measuring the dining-room?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Leonora.  ‘Are they?’

‘Yes, Mr. Dain has got ever such a long tape.’

Leonora went into the kitchen and talked to the cook.

The next morning an idea occurred to her.  Since the funeral, the girls had been down to see Uncle Meshach each afternoon, and Leonora had called at Church Street in the forenoon, so that the solitude of the old man might be broken at least twice a day.  When she had suggested the arrangement to her husband, John had answered stiffly, with an unimpeachable righteousness, that everything possible must be done for his uncle.  On this fourth day, Leonora sent Ethel and Milly in the morning, with a message that she herself would come in the afternoon, by way of change.  The phrase that sang in her head was Arthur’s promise to Meshach:  ‘I shall call in a day or two.’  She knew that he had not yet called.  ‘Don’t wait tea, if I should be late, dears,’ she said smilingly to the girls; ‘I may stay with uncle a while.’  And she nearly ran out of the house.

* * * * *

When they had had tea, and when Leonora had performed the delicate feat of arranging Uncle Meshach’s domestic affairs without affronting his servant, she sat down opposite to him before the fire in the parlour.

‘You’re for stopping a bit, eh?’ he said, as if surprised.

‘Well,’ she laughed, ‘wouldn’t you like me to?’

‘Oh, ay!’ he admitted readily, ’I’st like it well enough.  I don’t know but what you aren’t all on ye very good—­you and th’ wenches, and Fred as calls in of nights.  But it’s all one to me, I reckon.  I take no pleasure i’ life.  Nay,’ he went on, ’it isn’t because of her.  I’ve felt as I was done for for months past.  I mun just drag on.’

‘Don’t talk like that, uncle.’  She tried conventionally to cheer him.  ‘You must rouse yourself.’

‘What for?’

She sought a good answer to this conundrum.  ‘For all of us,’ she said lamely, at length.

‘Leonora, my lass,’ he remarked drily, ’you’re no better than the rest of ’em.’

And as she sat there in the age-worn parlour, and thought of the distant days of his energy, when with his own hands he had pulled down a wall and replaced it by a glass partition, and of the night when he lay like a corpse on Ethel’s bed at the mercy of his nephew, and of Aunt Hannah resting in the cold tomb just at the end of the street, her heart was filled for a moment with an awful, ineffable, devastating sadness.  It seemed to her that every grief, anxiety, apprehension was joy itself compared to this supreme tragedy of natural decay.