Would she see the steward that morning?  No, not that morning.  Things outside could go on for a while in their course as heretofore.  She feared to seem to take possession with pride, and then there was that conviction that it would be well to husband her resources.  So she sent for Mrs. Button, and asked Mrs. Button to walk through the rooms with her.  Mrs. Button came, but again declined to accept her lady’s condescension.  Every spot about the house, every room, closet and wardrobe, she was ready to open with zeal; the furniture she was prepared to describe, if Lady Ongar would listen to her; but every word was spoken in a solemn voice, very far removed from gossipping.  Only once was Mrs. Button moved to betray any emotion.  “That, my lady, was my lord’s mother’s room, after my lord died—­my lord’s father that was; may God bless her.”  Then Lady Ongar reflected that from her husband she had never heard a word either of his father or his mother.  She wished that she could seat herself with that woman in some small upstairs room, and then ask question after question about the family.  But she did not dare to make the attempt.  She could not bring herself to explain to Mrs. Button that she had never known anything of the belongings of her own husband.

When she had seen the upper part of the house, Mrs. Button offered to convoy her through the kitchens and servants’ apartments, but she declined this for the present.  She had done enough for the day.  So she dismissed Mrs. Button, and took herself to the library.  How often had she heard that books afforded the surest consolation to the desolate.  She would take to reading; not on this special day, but as the resource for many days and months, and years to come.  But this idea had faded and become faint, before she had left the gloomy, damp-feeling, chill room, in which some former Lord Ongar had stored the musty Volumes which he had thought fit to purchase.  The library gave her no ease, so she went out again among the lawns and shrubs.  For some time to come her best resources must be those which she could find outside the house.

Peering about, she made her way behind the stables, which were attached to the house, to a farm-yard gate, through which the way led to the headquarters of the live stock.  She did not go through, but she looked over the gate, telling herself that those barns and sheds, that wealth of straw-yard, those sleeping pigs and idle, dreaming calves, were all her own.  As she did so, her eye fell upon an old laborer, who was sitting close to her, on a felled tree, under the shelter of a paling, eating his dinner.  A little girl, some six years old, who had brought him his meal tied up in a handkerchief, was crouching near his feet.  They had both seen her before she had seen them, and when she noticed them, were staring at her with all their eyes.  She and they were on the same side of the farmyard paling, and so she could reach them and speak to them without difficulty.