“The harm is done,” she said; “you may speak out.  Is he wounded, or dead?”

“Dead.”

CHAPTER XI.

THE sun sank lower; the western breeze floated cool and fresh into the house.  As the evening advanced, the cheerful ring of the village clock came nearer and nearer.  Field and flower-garden felt the influence of the hour, and shed their sweetest fragrance.  The birds in Norah’s aviary sunned themselves in the evening stillness, and sang their farewell gratitude to the dying day.

Staggered in its progress for a time only, the pitiless routine of the house went horribly on its daily way.  The panic-stricken servants took their blind refuge in the duties proper to the hour.  The footman softly laid the table for dinner.  The maid sat waiting in senseless doubt, with the hot-water jugs for the bedrooms ranged near her in their customary row.  The gardener, who had been ordered to come to his master, with vouchers for money that he had paid in excess of his instructions, said his character was dear to him, and left the vouchers at his appointed time.  Custom that never yields, and Death that never spares, met on the wreck of human happiness—­and Death gave way.

Heavily the thunder-clouds of Affliction had gathered over the house—­heavily, but not at their darkest yet.  At five, that evening, the shock of the calamity had struck its blow.  Before another hour had passed, the disclosure of the husband’s sudden death was followed by the suspense of the wife’s mortal peril.  She lay helpless on her widowed bed; her own life, and the life of her unborn child, trembling in the balance.

But one mind still held possession of its resources—­but one guiding spirit now moved helpfully in the house of mourning.

If Miss Garth’s early days had been passed as calmly and as happily as her later life at Combe-Raven, she might have sunk under the cruel necessities of the time.  But the governess’s youth had been tried in the ordeal of family affliction; and she met her terrible duties with the steady courage of a woman who had learned to suffer.  Alone, she had faced the trial of telling the daughters that they were fatherless.  Alone, she now struggled to sustain them, when the dreadful certainty of their bereavement was at last impressed on their minds.

Her least anxiety was for the elder sister.  The agony of Norah’s grief had forced its way outward to the natural relief of tears.  It was not so with Magdalen.  Tearless and speechless, she sat in the room where the revelation of her father’s death had first reached her; her face, unnaturally petrified by the sterile sorrow of old age—­a white, changeless blank, fearful to look at.  Nothing roused, nothing melted her.  She only said, “Don’t speak to me; don’t touch me.  Let me bear it by myself”—­and fell silent again.  The first great grief which had darkened the sisters’ lives had, as it seemed, changed their everyday characters already.