That long coffin, raised high on its trestles, seemed to fill the little room.  Lucia saw it now, she saw the face in it turned up to the ceiling, sharp and yellow, the limp red moustache hanging like a curtain over the half-open mouth.  No trace of the tilted faun-like smile.

She would never get away from that terrible room.  The pattern of its walls (garlands of pink rosebuds between blue stripes) was stamped upon her brain.  There too, as in the salon, abode the inextinguishable odour shaken from Madame’s dress, it mixed with the hot reek of carbolic and the bitter stabbing odour of the coffin.

On the floor by the trestles lay a glove, a long enormous glove, Madame’s glove; it was greyish white, and wrinkled like the cast skin of a snake.  The finger of its fellow hung from the chest of drawers beside the crucifix.  It pointed downwards at the dead man.

Within the gay garlanded walls, surrounded by those symbols and souvenirs of Madame, he lay with his face turned up to the ceiling, and his mouth half open, as if it still gasped piteously for breath.  One more breath to beg for forgiveness, to defend himself, explain; while bit by bit the place he had lived in gave up his secret.

She could not tell whether she forgave him or not.  When she stood by him there she could have implored his forgiveness for having thus come upon him unawares, for having found what he had taken such pains to hide from her.  It seemed somehow cruel and unfair.  She did not tax him with hypocrisy, because he had so long contrived to keep himself clean in her sight; she was grateful to him for having spared her this knowledge.  But whether she forgave him or not—­no, looking back on it at this moment she could not tell.  Lucia was too young for the great forgiveness that comes of understanding.

She walked up and down the library, staring at the books, at the tables piled with papers; she stood at each window in turn and looked out on the garden, the valley and the hills, Harmouth Gap, and the long brown rampart line of Muttersmoor.  It was simply impossible for her to realize their once intimate relation to her life.

She was unaware that her mood was chiefly the result of physical and mental exhaustion.  It seemed to her rather that she had acquired strange powers of insight, that she had pierced to the back of the illusion.  Never had she possessed so luminous a sense of the unreality of things.  She found this view consoling, for it is the desire of unhappy youth that there shall be no permanence where there is pain.

On this unreal and insubstantial background faces came and went all day long, faces solemn and obsequious, faces glazed and feverish with emotion; Robert’s face with red-rimmed eyes hiding Robert’s unutterable sympathy under a thin mask of fright; Kitty’s face with an entirely new expression on it; and her own face met them with an incomprehensible and tearless calm.  For she was not even sure of that, not even sure of her own sorrow.  She had had to do with sorrow once before, when her grandfather died, and she thought she would be sure to know it when it came to her again; but she had no name for this new feeling, and at times it seemed to her that it was not sorrow at all.