The girl came up stairs, looking rather frightened and much out of breath.

“Please, m’m, Mrs. Paterson has sent me to tell you, and would you please come as soon as it is convenient?  Mrs. Lavender has died.  It was quite sudden—­only she recovered a little after the fit, and then sank:  the doctor is there now, but he wasn’t in time, it was all so sudden.  Will you please come round, m’m?”

“Yes—­I shall be there directly,” said Sheila, too bewildered and stunned to think of the possibility of meeting her husband there.

The girl left, and Sheila still stood in the middle of the room apparently stupefied.  That old woman had got into such a habit of talking about her approaching death that Sheila had ceased to believe her, and had grown to fancy that these morbid speculations were indulged in chiefly for the sake of shocking bystanders.  But a dead man or a dead woman is suddenly invested with a great solemnity; and Sheila with a pang of remorse thought of the fashion in which she had suspected this old woman of a godless hypocrisy.  She felt, too, that she had unjustly disliked Mrs. Lavender—­that she had feared to go near her, and blamed her unfairly for many things that had happened.  In her own way that old woman in Kensington Gore had been kind to her:  perhaps the girl was a little ashamed of herself at this moment that she did not cry.

Her father went out with her, and up to the house with the dusty ivy and the red curtains.  How strangely like was the aspect of the house inside to the very picture that Mrs. Lavender had herself drawn of her death!  Sheila could remember all the ghastly details that the old woman seemed to have a malicious delight in describing; and here they were—­the shutters drawn down, the servants walking about on tiptoe, the strange silence in one particular room.  The little shriveled old body lay quite still and calm now; and yet as Sheila went to the bedside, she could hardly believe that within that forehead there was not some consciousness of the scene around.  Lying almost in the same position, the old woman, with a sardonic smile on her face, had spoken of the time when she should be speechless, sightless and deaf, while Paterson would go about stealthily as if she was afraid the corpse would hear.  Was it possible to believe that the dead body was not conscious at this moment that Paterson was really going about in that fashion—­that the blinds were down, friends standing some little distance from the bed, a couple of doctors talking to each other in the passage outside?

They went into another room, and then Sheila, with a sudden shiver, remembered that soon her husband would be coming, and might meet her and her father there.

“You have sent for Mr. Lavender?” she said calmly to Mrs. Paterson.

“No, ma’am,” Paterson said with more than her ordinary gravity and formality:  “I did not know where to send for him.  He left London some days ago.  Perhaps you would read the letter, ma’am.”